Resources
I used to have this page on my old mattymatt site, but I haven’t touched these links in years. I am recreating the page here for the sake of preserving some of these links but also in hopes that I may revisit this page and bring it more up to date with resources and reference material.
Type & Lettering
Sheaff : Ephemera
Richard Sheaff’s site is entirely devoted to preserving and sharing ephemera. This is a gold mine for vintage type, lettering, engraving, illustration, and so much more.
TM Research Archive
This website is derived from an exhaustive research on the Typographische Monatsblätter focusing on the issues from 1960 till 1990.
Vanderblog
A resource for the maintenance and history of Vandercook proof presses. Developed and moderated by Paul Moxon.
Letterology
Jennifer Kennard’s has been around since 2008 and has since documented a huge variety of vintage type as well as illustration.
La cerveza de Marc
An insane amount of high resolution scans of alcohol labels. We’re talking thousands of images.
Vintage Illustration
Luggage Labels
David Pearson’s Flickr photostream of vintage luggage labels is a good mix of type and illustration.
Vintage Book Collection
Mallory’s blog is one of my favorites because it’s chock-full of children book illustrations, plus she even sells some of the books on Etsy.
File Photo Digital Archive
This Flickr photostream serves to archive a large number of incredible vintage adverts all scanned at high resolution.
Paul Malon
Paul has nearly 25,000 photos of vintage goodness. Either browse through his photostream or filter through his carefully curated albums.
Gregg Koenig
Gregg’s collection is primarily illustrations on various food packaging (mostly cereal), but there is also a ton of illustrations for toys.
Jason Liebig
Similar to the stream above, Jason collects tons of food packaging and advertisements so there’s a lot of tasty illustrations.
Dan Goodsell
Albums of Dan’s that I suggest checking out are Disneyland Souvenirs, Holiday Themes, Space Theme, and Cereal.
Book Design
Henry Altemus Company
Almost every Altemus book ever published can be found within this site. This is a great resource for old book design and includes some wonderful type.