The Ault & Wiborg Poster Album

December 23, 2018 5:41 AM

Ault & Wiborg were a leading US printing ink manufacturer and distributor around the turn of the 20th century. To promote their business, they produced a sample book with beautiful posters showcasing potential uses of their products. The full album has been digitized by the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, and individual posters can be downloaded as high res scans.

Some more history.
Some of the posters were designed by American artist Will H. Bradley.

posted by carter (9 comments total)

Neat. I'm often tempted to go looking for interesting public domain stuff so I can take advantage of my banner printer, and these are great examples of vibrant poster art. Thanks for finding them!
posted by Making You Bored For Science at 12:03 PM on December 23, 2018

But that site ... it barely works.
posted by bz at 1:28 PM on December 23, 2018 [3 favorites]

Carter, thanks for posting this. A&W produced the letter-pressed poster ads using the very same inks they were showcasing and placed them in the trade journals of the day. Eventually there were so many requests from printers and poster collectors that they collated their best ads into the Album. I wrote about it on my blog, including more history about Ault and Wiborg and more images scanned in highish-res from my copy of the album.

IYI, here's the link: The Ault & Wiborg Poster Album
posted by codex99 at 1:43 PM on December 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'm with bz — that's a terrible website. Presenting each page as a single PDF with a download link that hides behind JS is a bad thing.
posted by scruss at 3:42 PM on December 23, 2018

Huh. For a moment I wondered whether this was a first (or at least very early) use of "blue jeans" to evoke a specific color, but the Wikipedia entry for "jeans" says the use of "blue jeans" to mean a particular kind of color predates Levi Strauss' trousers.

Anyway, I love how some pages show an impressive display of color blending, and some pages shrug and say "fuckit, have a red."

If these posters are organized chronologically, they show an interesting progression (or, I guess, regression) from simple bragging about how A&W inks are the best to defensive tirades about how printers unwilling to charge their customers extra to use superior inks are harming everybody.

The metal inks seem mostly very dull and dark. I wonder whether they're victims of inadequate scanning facilities or have just suffered from age and the lack of slipsheets. You can even see transfer in the metal inks on some pages. For example, the gold ink here picks from its opposite page.
posted by ardgedee at 4:31 PM on December 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

We have a few of these at my museum that we showed alongside other posters of the general time period. I love them not only for themselves but because of Sara Wiborg , who married Gerald Murphy. The two of them were at the center of the French and American literary and artistic scene in the inter-war period.
posted by PussKillian at 5:51 PM on December 23, 2018

bz and scruss,

I feel you... that collection is hosted on a vendor called contentdm (they're owned by OCLC). As the web developer for a public library that also uses contentdm, my reaction is shared jadedness and frustration because I can see so much more potential for a better interface so patrons can use digital collections in a more intuitive fashion, just for starters.

That interface is contentdm's default with limited configuration options behind the scenes; they just implemented a responsive interface earlier this year (in 2018!).

The alternative (besides going with a new vendor) is to build a completely fresh interface and work completely with its API whose its documentation can be improved (my struggles with it are no doubt exacerbated by my ineptitude of javascript). One example, I can only fetch thumbnails of those items as 150x150px or I can fetch the entire image/binary file and resize on the fly (but I'm still obtaining the entire object and who knows how many MBs....); the lack of CORS support, etc..

From the patron side, unable to browse items by when they're added to collection; unable to browse at more than 10 items in a search result... (just for starters...I have a list of criticisms on my work computer.))

I understand this is a derail (I'm considering just mefi'ing you this message but since there's other librarians on here who may share their experiences with contentdm, I'll let it stay) but on the plus side, I've met some of the employees and they're nice people.
posted by fizzix at 12:52 PM on December 24, 2018 [4 favorites]

For what it's worth, here's the direct link to a PDF of the entire collection.
posted by smammy at 9:15 AM on December 25, 2018 [2 favorites]

unable to browse at more than 10 items in a search result.

where did the idea that this is OK come from?
posted by thelonius at 9:19 AM on December 25, 2018