Tag Archives: design

I feel the need for seed. Wait…

I thought I had a chance at this Northrup King Northern Grown Tested Seeds box at Saturday’s North Star Auction, but I’ll skip the middle part of the story and say it ended at $775 and I didn’t even get my hand up. One of the best vintage illustrations and designs I’ve seen, and also one of the best preserved. Magnificent!

Northrup King Northern Grown Tested Seeds box
Northrup King Northern Grown Tested Seeds box
Northrup King Northern Grown Tested Seeds box

Nothing sucks like Electrolux.

Seen at an auction, an Electrolux Users Manual, the front and back cover seen here.

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These Suds Ain’t Duds

Midcentury-ish boxes of soap of the following brands: Oxydol, Ivory Snow, Nola, Vel and Duz
Midcentury-ish boxes of soap of the following brands: Oxydol, Ivory Snow, Nola, Vel and Duz

This last Saturday was laundry day at the North Star Auction in Mandan, North Dakota.

Also, back in the day, laundry soap and dish soap were often the same soap.

Check out the sweet package art.

Woe Is Me

Walt Kuhn for Life humor magazine, December 13, 1906

Dance with a Witch in the Moonlight

Collier’s Magazine, November 1, 1947

One of the finest Halloween covers in American magazine history.
Art by the brilliant Earl Oliver Hurst.

This Week in Ephemera

This is a score! The entire 1916 year of McCall’s magazine and in beautiful condition, especially considering these twelve issues are over a hundred years old.

Wisdom

Whisper admonished me for failing to reach a zen state because I stress about things I should no longer care about.

“If you give somebody a perfectly grilled steak and they take it and slather shampoo and gravel all over it and then complain that it isn’t any good, that’s on them, not you. Meow.”

Whisper is wise.

Bill Boley was a madman.

Fresh from an antique store in Bismarck, a 1952 book on how to make different typefaces by hand. Thank God for computers (on the 8th day).

Bodoni the old-old-old-school way. I bodon’t think so.

Store display poster for M•A•C and Star Trek — Brilliant!

M•A•C and Star Trek

They made it so.