1900s Photo Album with tons of Beautiful Photographs

I became interested in vintage vernacular photographs because I found a bunch of family photos from an estate sale.  One or more of the photographers in the family had a very good eye.  I found all these beautifully composed snapshots - they seemed almost accidentally good at times. 

I began buying old collections of photographs, and then I found out that not all families have a good photographer in them!  This photo album, though, is chock full of fantastic shots!

 

  

For sale in my etsy store!

Illustrations from 1880s Children's Book

This is just one of the fabulous pages from an 1880s German Children's picture book. In the 1880s, a house catching on fire was considered appropriate subject matter for a kindergartener's picture book!

An Old Photo Album from the 1920s

I've had this little album for quite a while, and now I'm putting it up for sale in my shop. There are some very cute shots in this one. There's an adorable little boy and a bunch of pretty girls.

You can see it listed in my etsy store!

Update: This has sold

Old Photographs Tell Stories

These ladies are amazing characters. Their plant is a character too!

I think it might be a baby banana plant in which case they would have to have a greenhouse somewhere. You can see a couple other specimen plants in a border along the fence, and a trellis roof just peeking in on the right of the picture. These women are obviously not wealthy, but are gardening enthusiasts.

The ladies themselves, well, I bet there were stories about them all over town. The one in the middle is either the oldest sister or the mother. And she's kind of just back there in the shadows.

The one one the right, just look at that incredible perma-frown! That's her happy take the picture frown.

(We all have an aunt like that, don't we. The one who has no life, but who has ideas about how everyone else's life could be improved and who takes personal offense when we don't follow her dictums and whims. She loudly and constantly voices her disapproval and unhappiness about just about everything and then wonders why no one visits her.) I'll just call her the Wicked Witch of the West for short. I'm TOTALLY just talking about the photo.

Someone should have told her that her hairstyle is the exact wrong one for someone with that huge expanse of a forehead. Also, the enormous bows were for little girls. Wouldn't it be just the worst if she was the school teacher? Anyway, her hair is all neat and tidy as is her dress and apron.

I'm thinking the woman on the left must be the Cinderella of the clan. Her gingham apron is dirty, wrinkled and wet and her hair is unkempt. She was really not ready for this photo.

In my mind the Wicked Witch of the West told her they had to take the picture right then and no they could not wait because can't you see the light will be all wrong in 15 minutes and then we'll have to wait until tomorrow don't be so vain.

I think Cinderella does all the heavy lifting and I'm guessing she just watered the banana tree and washed out the pails that are drying upside down on the fence behind them.

But in the end, it's all about the plant, and the plant does look very impressive.

To see more fantastic old photographs, visit my etsy store!

Amelia in the Glade with Pomegranates

My Etsy Store is called Old Paper

I love antique and vintage ephemera. All the scraps and slips of paper you'd find in your grandmother's drawer, or tucked into books, or included in scrapbooks that were never meant to last and have acquired beauty by becoming old, rare and sometimes mysterious.

Before I ever heard of the word ephemera, I found a bit of old paper tucked into an old book I bought. It was in German, and I spent hours trying to figure out what was written on this funky, orange, coarse, fragile piece of paper in that German medieval looking script. With the help of babblefish, I puzzled out that it was a flyer for Prof. Dr. Erwin Hartwig's remedy for weak, watery eyes with testamonials from people in Chicago and Milwaukee. He must have ridden up and down the train line, right along the lake with occasional clusters of buildings (and one extensive Naval training facility) breaking up the landscape of forested ravines, sandy dunes, blue lake and sky.

Maybe he lived in my town, midway between the two cities. So I had to find out what it would have been like being a traveling Professor Doctor in the late 19th Century.  So, I spent hours finding out that when he lived here, the woods and ravines were barely dented by commercial knots that have now completely .  The crystal clear spring waters bubbling up from the big ravine were renowned for their healing powers - and as a great supply for the local brewery. 

All that from an old piece of paper.