19th century artistic printing

June 8, 2009 8:41 PM

Beautifully designed, quirky, colorful late 19th-century "artistic" and "gaslight" printing at Dick Sheaff's ephemera pages. [via, via]

Info here. There's a book, too.

posted by mediareport (10 comments total)

You can see where a few pages of the Chris Ware playbook came from.
posted by Slack-a-gogo at 8:54 PM on June 8, 2009

This one's title looks like it belongs to a horror story :P
posted by delmoi at 9:28 PM on June 8, 2009

They had Car Talk back then?
posted by Number Used Once at 9:45 PM on June 8, 2009 [1 favorite]

NOOOOO! I was the only one who was supposed to know about artistic printing! That's why Doug Clouse and Angela Voulangas wrote and compiled The Handy Book of Artistic Printing! So I could read it, buy it, become enlightened, and set about to slaveringly conjure up my own new artwork out of it. Now everyone will know about the amazingness of artistic printing! How could you, mediareport? How? Could? You?
posted by redsparkler at 10:43 PM on June 8, 2009

I love the "belching smokestack" genre of corporate logo. They were so proud of their pollution back than. They wanted to show "the smoke of prosperity".
posted by octothorpe at 4:12 AM on June 9, 2009 [1 favorite]

You can see where Chris Ware's entire career came from.

Ha, but that's a little unfair. Ware's work is about a lot more than this kind of design. And as someone at the Comics Journal message board says:

Yeah, Ware is pretty upfront about this. Daniel Raeburn's book has a lot of direct comparisons between period design and Ware's stuff. In many cases, it was striking how little he changed from the original image.
posted by mediareport at 5:15 AM on June 9, 2009

But octothorpe, Mensing & Stecher is Connected By Telephone!

Thank you for this. How I love Victorian-era advertising. Once I found a bound 1897 Sears-Roebuck catalog in my library's reference section... I could have stayed there all day.
posted by Ladybug Parade at 6:36 AM on June 9, 2009

Fear this.
posted by Paid In Full at 9:54 AM on June 9, 2009

Gorgeous stuff.
posted by bz at 10:53 AM on June 9, 2009

This kind of stuff is the kind of stuff I like.
posted by The Whelk at 12:29 PM on June 9, 2009 [1 favorite]