The modern poster saw the light during "La Belle Époque" in France. The best artists became involved in creating advertisements for bicycles. chocolate, theatre performances, detergents and liquor. Government offices could quickly fathom how effective these posters were, and soon tasked these artists with the job of mobilising the masses for war and sacrifice. Thus began the era of "Selling War Like Margarine".

During their extensive travels in Europe and beyond, the radical and iconic Swedish writer Jan Myrdal (1927-2020) and his wife Gun Kessle (1926-2007) collected propaganda and war posters from the twentieth century's world wars, most of them French and Italian in origin. The book "Selling War Like Margarine" is Myrdal's own commentary to their huge collection of war posters, before it was donated in 2005 to the National Library of Sweden.

"Selling War Like Margarine" belongs to Myrdal's most universal texts and can be read with equal interest regardless of the reader's political views.