In the spring of 1939, the UK government's Ministry of Information commissioned a series of wall posters designed to assuage public anxiety. The first poster went into production in August 1939-a month before England declared war on Germany. Its message was stridently chirpy: "Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution will Bring Us Victory." The second poster featured the rather deflating "Freedom is in Peril"-and like the first, it was plastered in shop windows and rail stations. The third poster had the largest print run of all-historians estimate 2.5 million copies made-but it was held in reserve, to be deployed only in the event Hitler's soldiers got their boots on English soil. Its slogan was "Keep Calm and Carry On." Seventy years later, the "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster is back. This week it attained the highest honor a bit of kitsch could aspire to: it was wanly saluted by Rob Walker in The New York Times magazine.

You can buy reproductions here, here, here and here. You can read a charming story of how the husband-and-wife proprietors of a Northumberland bookshop rediscovered the poster at the bottom of a box bought at auction here. You can witness design obsessives whining about the poster here. ("If you watch MTV cribs everyone has the requisite copy of Scarface lying around... Keep Calm is the Scarface of the [Apartment Therapy] world....") You can find 129 variations here. Ron Weasley in a black "Keep Calm" t-shirt can be glimpsed here. A special swine-flu edition ("Keep Calm and Don't Sneeze") is for sale here.

This flurry of commercial activity has led to speculation-elsewhere than the Times-as to what it all means. In an article for The Guardian newspaper, reporter Jon Henley quoted Alain Samson of the London School of Economics to the effect that it signified our strong desire for comfort and solidarity. In hard times, Samson said, "people are brought together by looking for common values or purposes... The words are also particularly positive, reassuring, in a period of uncertainty, anxiety, even perhaps of cynicism."

Hard times like the Blitz? Is that a good analogy for what we're experiencing? I mean, comparing our current economic recession-Depression, downturn, whatever you like to call it-to tucking your kids into bed in your snug East End apartment as the Luftwaffe drops bombs on your hometown for 57 consecutive nights, killing over 20,000 civilians and destroying over a million homes...well, that's an interesting comparison to make.

Bear in mind the Ministry of Information was saving "Keep Calm and Carry On" for a "real" crisis-i.e. ground invasion-and never distributed the posters widely. (Exactly how they expected to implement a PSA campaign with Nazi soldiers at their backs remains a mystery.) But still, why are people today rushing to brandish their stiff upper lips?

Perhaps a Keep Calm mug really is "ideal to reassure when things are going tit's up" as a slice of copy on keepcalmandcarryon.com put it.

Or it could be that the vogue for Keep Calm products isn't about comfort after all. As unambiguously soothing platitudes go, "Keep Calm and Carry On" shoots and misses, and we know this because it loosely translates to "Shut Up and Keep Moving" and is thus fairly explicit acknowledgment that things have, in fact, gone quite badly. It says you and everyone else has reason to be scared.

But the cynical take on this trend is so easily arrived at that a precocious tenth-grader could do it: All this merchandising is simply more evidence of our relentlessly commercial mindset, proof positive that we can't contemplate anything, least of all deprivation of any kind, without immediately and reflexively itching to buy something, preferably something that communicates how we're feeling.

Luckily someone has anticipated this interpretation, not to mention those synapses firing in that dark recess of your lizard brain that remember George W. Bush's call for everyone to keep shopping or the terrorists win, and produced a handsome "Buy More Shit Or We're All Fucked" canvas totebag. But of course you don't tote this bag (while shopping) because you actually believe that; you tote it so show that you're superior to all the people who do.

What seems most likely is that the "Keep Calm" poster resonates for the same reason Fox News Channel is enjoying its best ratings ever. We enjoy freaking out. We also enjoy congratulating ourselves for not freaking out when everybody else is.

The poster also looks nice framed. And no one knows who designed it. Nobody has come forward to claim a copyright. So while an anonymous WWII-era civil servant's heirs-assuming there are any-are missing out on sizable royalties, a handful of sly small business owners have benefited enormously. Mark Coop of Surrey, former freelance television producer and current keepcalmandcarryon.com visionary, has even brought in his half-retired mother to help him fulfill orders. The work gets her out of the house, she's having good fun, and money is made.

Here's the obligatory service journalism part: So if we decide that it's important for our moms to have the opportunity to exploit decades-old work that (a) can't be traced to an original creator, and (b) fills a contemporary need-be it thumbsucking or decorating or pledging allegiance to stoicism-then we should start pressuring our congressional representatives to stop dithering on the question of orphan works. Without getting mired in the Free debate, I think we can all agree that content created by dead people, content that has no discernable or identifiable owner, well, that content does want to be free, and should be. Oh, and if you want to be humbled by one local man's dedication to long-forgotten and discarded texts, click here.

Megan Hustad is a writer based in New York.