Let's Bury Tomorrow

Two Men With A Secret

The illustrations for this collage were found in an old Reader's Digest Condensed book. These old and often dusty, worthless looking books you find for a dime a dozen at thrift stores contain some incredibly interesting and underappreciated illustrations from little known artists. For those who are fans of old illustrations, these sad looking books are worth checking out.

Homo Marxian

It's rather rare to find any interesting books about communism in thrift stores and if one is found, it will usually be filled with hilarious and scary anecdotes about communists and in the same breath you will be pressured to convert to Christianity if you already haven't, just because you wanted to read a book about communism.
A couple of books I've found over the years stand out, not only because it's unusual at least around these parts to find any books on communism that aren't thinly veiled religious tomes but also because these two particular books have excellent illustrations. The books whose illustrations of communism should be noted are The Naked Communist and Communism, An American's View. Granted, The Naked Communist has a religious slant to it and the preaching begins towards the end when you've been about scared out of your wits by the communist boogieman but never mind the text, it's the illustrations we're after!
Each book was filled with some great pieces, and the second book mentioned, Communism, An American's View, is full of woodcuts of Stalin, Marx, Lenin, and other creatures often found in texts of this sort, the artwork being completed by Leonard Everett Fisher, who also designed several postage stamps.
The pieces in the collage were culled from these two books.

Voyeur

Megasoundscape

Recently I found a box of Ilford photography paper at a local thrift store. Surely the paper wouldn't be good for developing photos but I knew I could use it in my collages. One night I decided to use a piece of photo paper and run it through my printer, printing out a copy of a piece of vintage illustration of a sound wave I'd scanned. It worked pretty well and I set the paper under my lamp to dry. After a few days I noticed that the paper had turned a nice brown hue. Here's the result.

Birds in Nocturnus

Some pieces I recently cut out

GESTURE

The flower used here is cut from a garden book that is around 90 years old. 

Vacuum Tube Robot

A nice piece of foxed endpaper and some vintage electronics images from the 1955 electronic educational book Basic Electronics by Van Valkenburgh helped create this blue faced robot. 

Basic Electronics is filled with hundreds of images of vacuum tubes, capacitors, and funny pictures of electronic technicians. If you ever see a copy of this book at a thrift store, grab it. It's one of the best books I've seen for electronic graphics.

Check out my Vintage Science Set over at Flickr for images from this book.

Strawberries for Astra

SOLD

 

At first, this piece was going to be created for a mail art project but magically morphed itself into a small collage. I fell in love with the beautifully foxed endpaper and felt it would do better as a collage.

Creatures of Theda Bara

Infoculture: Mad

Created to just have some fun and send out my good friend Stu some collaged handmade postcards. The doll on the front of the card is an Edison Talking Doll invented by Thomas Edison in 1890. Unfortunately these dolls turned out not to be so desirable by the little Victorian ones and soon the Edison Talking Doll was no more.

Jesus Mows Stonehenge

Through the Looking Glass

Duty Now For the Future