Help me with my "laser".

March 26, 2008 9:57 AM

Is there an online source for digital, high resolution old catalogs? I'm thinking turn of the century Sears & Roebuck sorts of things.

I have access to a laser engraver. It's has lot of potential for making very cool prints. It's attached to a computer and set to print from either corel draw or autocad. I don't have a problem converting jpgs to vector graphics. I'm not too handy with graphic design stuff, so I wanted to find some cool old prints/plates. Since the laser can only produce monochromatic works, I figured that old black and white catalog plates would work well as a source.

Does any one know of a good repository to find such pictures? Old copper engravings and etchings work well too.

So far I've had luck with visipix, but the material mostly limited to Japanese woodblock prints.

Bonus if you can find things with a turn of the century victorian feel. Penny farthings and that sort of thing.

posted by Telf to media & arts (7 comments total)

When I'm looking for old timey images like the ones you describe I either go to Cornell's The Making of America website or to Library of Congress' Advertising section in their American Memory project, partcularly the broadsides and printed ephemera.
posted by jessamyn at 10:25 AM on March 26, 2008

Well, not to state the obvious, but Princeton Imaging sells CD-ROMS of the stuff, as does Dover and MetaFilter talks about engraving from time to time.

In the world of catalogs, Wishbookweb.com only goes back to 1940, unfortunately. Duke has a hefty collection of Ad Illustration, but it's from 1911 on, and mostly mid-centuryish.

Georgia State has a collection of labor-related political cartoons from the 19th century which might have some gems in it.

Many Project Gutenberg documents, like the Scientific American Supplements, contain high-res scans of engravings (of about this quality...a pennyfarthing, did you say?) in the HTML versions. I know of no way to search just for PG docs with images in them, however, and can't even link you to a listing because of the way PG's search engine works. They really need to tag their stuff with some meta.

The Old Catablog collects what you're looking for, though the images may not all be of high-enough resolution for your ends.
posted by mumkin at 11:18 AM on March 26, 2008

Oops. Sorry, Project Gutenberg obviously doesn't like me linking directly into its image directory, which is completely understandable. Mea maxima culpa. The images I referred to are in this etext, for what it's worth.
posted by mumkin at 11:23 AM on March 26, 2008

While not Sears catalogs, the Smithsonian has an online digital collection of sewing machine manuals and trade publications. I stumbled across it when I was looking for an instruction manual for a 1920-era Singer.

You have to really search through the collection, since a lot of the entries haven't been scanned yet. The Singer manual I found had been scanned (clean and high-rez!) and was available as a free PDF download. Lots of cool engravings and photo-gravure images can be found if you're diligent.
posted by Thorzdad at 12:11 PM on March 26, 2008

Yeah, along the lines of what Thorzdad said, while I didn't find any sites with the complete Sears Catalog from 1892 online, you do find a fair number of one-to-five page spreads hosted by people with a particular focus on something. Like sewing machines, pocketwatches, brass musical instruments, etc. It's fairly easy to find 'em with Google image search. Just search for engraving and restrict it to returning "Extra Large images."... you'll find the kinds of sites you're looking for, and can then click-through and explore their content further.
posted by mumkin at 12:56 PM on March 26, 2008

Hit up online sources for 19th century illustrated newspapers like Frank Leslie's or the NY Daily Graphic. They are mother-lodes of interesting engravings. Thompson Gale has a great database of tons of old newspaper content.
posted by JJ86 at 1:20 PM on March 26, 2008

Thanks for the input guys. I'm looking through all the above sources right now. I asked one of my friends this question after posting today, and he suggested google patents. The results were astounding.

Fully searchable, very fast. PDF format in very good resolution.
posted by Telf at 2:56 PM on March 26, 2008