Popular graphic art prints often reflect the tastes of their times, and fashion trends are one particularly fascinating area to survey. As we find ourselves ensconced in the fall season and quickly approaching winter, we were inspired to look for cold weather fashions in print. Join us as we look at details from one print.
Today’s post uses Margaret Wise Brown’s classic bedtime story Goodnight Moon as a playful framework for exploring the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog. It incorporates a variety of items from across the collection, including stereographs, lithographs, trademark registrations, and photographs.
Every other month, staff in the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division come together for a “Learning Hour,” a time dedicated to knowledge sharing, training, and discussion. This month’s session took the form of a challenge: each participant opened an unfamiliar box from the collections and reported back on what they discovered. How is the collection arranged and described? What might a researcher encounter when using it? How could access be improved? This week’s post highlights some of the insights that emerged from that exercise.
A piece of Hardanger embroidery in a recent Flickr album on needlework inspires a deeper dive into the collections for more images of this regional style of embroidery, specific to the Hardanger area of western Norway.
Fans of art nouveau design may be surprised to learn that the Prints & Photographs Division has more than a dozen striking images by the man widely credited as the originator of the style -- Czech artist Alphonse Mucha -- in the collections. See some examples in this blog post.
Continuing in the same vein as last week’s post, today we are looking at the people, technologies, and skills involved with making ice cream. The post will incorporate both photographs and printed matter from the collection and will focus on home production of ice cream.
Sample some images from the Library of Congress postcard collections in this post as we prepare to host a webinar on April 16 featuring a broad selection of postcards from the late 19th century forward. We hope this quick introduction will encourage you to watch the live event – or listen to the recording if you aren’t able to make it!
In a recent post, we introduced a slew of newly processed or digitized collections. This week we are highlighting a newly available and graphically fun collection, the U.S. Patent Office Trademarks—brands, logos, and images registered between 1869 and 1911. We will do this through a selection of whimsical images featuring magical and mythical creatures such as fairies, dragons, mermaids, and gnomes.
We celebrate National Pencil Day on March 30. This post in our occasional series, Profiling Portraits, focuses on portraits where the subject has a pencil in hand, and it is connected to their identity as writer, journalist, and artist.