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We would take the uncopyrighted images, size them and run ad copy around them. It did not occur to many editors to use clip art with the stories and features and columns and stuff.
In the 1960s, however, Dover Books started publishing a remarkable series of affordable clip-art collections of very old black and white art. These etchings, engravings, woodcuts and other images were copied from ancient Montgomery Wards catalogs, magazines whose copyrights had expired, and out of print novels and travelogues. These drawings, created between 1750 and World War II, ranged from the bizarre to the beautiful, and the crude to the crafted. I fell in love with these collections, and for years I would bend over backwards to shoehorn these odd and unusual images into the publications I worked on.
When PCs became popular, this old art acquired yet a third life, as opportunistic companies offered the public domain artwork on budget clip-art collections. But never has a collection included so many of these old treasures as the new "MasterClips 101,000" collection from IMSI ($60, 415-257-3000). This collection includes a virtual ton of art -- 33,000 scaleable vector images done in contemporary styles, 26,000 photos, 2,000 Windows fonts, 500 soundwaves, and a score of video clips. I know it doesn't add up to 101,000, but it's still an awful lot.
And the crown jewel of the collection, for me at least, are the 40,000 old pictures from the Dover collection. Pick up a magnifying glass and stroll through the image book, and a zillion wonderful possibilities leap out at you:
over 300 images of stylized British lions alone, claws bared to all comers;
an entire page devoted to custard desserts of the 19th century, so yummy in black and white;
and random items up the wazoo: chamber pots, Old Glories, Model Ts, steamships, blacksmith tools, barbells, dingbats, and cherubs by the drove.
The selection of children is remarkable. Page after page of stiff-faced joyless creatures, in pinafores and lace. You get the idea that "cute" is an idea of fairly recent coinage. Women, on the other hand, are dreamily romanticized, gossamer angels living among men.
Some of this stuff is extremely corny, like the food and dining section with its 100 linocuts of bonneted chefs, all tweaking their mustaches at the latest mess of pottage they have cooked up. Other portions shriek out the vanities and pomposities of a dozen eras, from the Anglo-centric jingoism of the world history section to the pious portraits of our founding fathers.
From time to time, you encounter an image that suggests that artists have always been depressed. Some of the Victorian artists in particular found relief from the endless cataloguing of household objects by inking detailed depictions of houseflies and eyeballs and extracted molars. It all suggests a morbid, Blue Velvet-like interest in the seamier side of existence, of bones, bugs, and medicine bottles. Born too soon, these sad people today would be living the high life illustrating alternative music album covers.
The skill levels vary, from meticulous vistas and landscapes taken from picaresque novels, to a singularly inept picture of an American eagle clutching arrows, looking more like a dyspeptic chicken than the bird we all rise from our seats for today.
The 101,000 (more or less) images come on not one CD-ROM but a portfolio of nine disks. The contemporary graphics are in WMF format, easily imported and sizable by most word processors and desktop publishing programs. The Dover images are in the dowdier, less scaleable but still usable TIFF format.
The only problem I have with the MasterClips collection is that the sheer size of it makes it uncatalogable. The handful of books that come with it include all the pictures, but they are all about three quarters of an inch square in size. Pictures of discreet items like sofas and thimbles are easily discerned. Pictures of the sacking of Troy are harder to make out. The package includes a browser, but picture clarity is not good.
How useful are these old pictures for your publishing? They may be too ironic or odd for conventional business materials. The contemporary WMF images are great for that, though.
But the old pictures open up all sorts of interesting possibilities for subtler items -- newsletters, corporate histories, mission statements, web pages, slide presentations, employee communications, what-if thinking.
If you're curious what these image I've mentioned look like, bop on over to my website at http://mfinley.com/images.htm and check some out. I have created a small gallery of unusual drawings from the past, just for you, free to use any way you like. They are converted to GIF format, so they are only usable at the size I choose. But they still provide an eerie look at a bygone sensibility.
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