Illustrated ephemera

March 18, 2008 10:34 AM

Looking for online collections of vintage hand-drawn illustrations (like so, but minus the envelope), preferably high quality.

I'm specifically looking for smallish devices (i.e. telephones, pencil sharpeners, cigarette lighters, etc..), but would be interested in virtually anything illustrated in this style.

I have a couple books with clip art similar to this, but I'm looking expressly for online resources. Thanks!

posted by bjork24 to media & arts (8 comments total)

I like Havana Street. It's not free though.
posted by Miko at 11:03 AM on March 18, 2008

Clipart.com has royalty-free illustrations from Dover.
posted by breaks the guidelines? at 11:07 AM on March 18, 2008

Not sure how much industrial illustration they have, but BibliOdyssey is pretty far up there in the "illustrated ephemera" department.
posted by rhizome at 11:46 AM on March 18, 2008

from the blue.
posted by kidsleepy at 12:33 PM on March 18, 2008

Blue to the rescue!
posted by bjork24 at 1:27 PM on March 18, 2008

Dover puts out a sampler every week with downloadable images.
posted by kitty teeth at 2:01 PM on March 18, 2008

http://patentroom.com/ ?
posted by peacay at 2:04 PM on March 18, 2008

http://www.oldbookillustrations.com/ (see technology)
If those 2 links don't do it for you, drop me a line. I can almost certainly come up with a fair few more.

Otherwise you may like the offerings from the Universities of Strasbourg - they have a lot of technical stuff eg: 'Recueil des travaux scientifiques' by Léon Foucault -- and they have enormous images available. But it depends a bit on how simple, how technical, how old, what instruments etc you want - Strasbourg has a fair few different things from microscopes to machinery.

The machine database at the Max Planck institute may be of interest?
posted by peacay at 2:31 PM on March 18, 2008