Chwast’s poster advertises the services of Cooper & Beatty, an important graphic design firm founded in Toronto in 1921 as a typesetting business and was intended to be sent to clients and potential clients. A palmograph is a chart used in palm reading or palmistry, a kind of fortune telling based on a reading of the distinctive characteristics of an individual hand. While the practice dates back to antiquity, Chwast’s design, with its ominous messages and peculiar animals and motifs, reflects the style of palmographs made during the Victorian era when there was a huge public fervor for many such pseudo-scientific quackeries; this kind of vintage ephemera has inspired many of his compositions.