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Yet more casual wanderings have brought us to the The John Grossman Collection of Antique Images, an archive founded by a commercial and fine artist who started collecting in the 1960’s.

The John Grossman Collection of Antique Images is one of the most comprehensive archives of Victorian and Edwardian graphic ephemera in the world. This amazing collection of material culture contains more than 250,000 printed and handwritten paper artifacts from the 1800s and early 1900s. The finest examples of ephemera are represented here, including calendars, greeting cards, trade cards, product labels, paper dolls, tickets, postcards, scrapbooks and sheet music. These objects feature colorful images that symbolize the customs, attitudes and ideals of Victorian and Edwardian life: innocent children, garden-fresh flowers, romantic couples, holiday traditions, fashionable women, humanized animals and cigar-smoking gentlemen.

Most of our images span one hundred years, from 1820 to 1920. But we also have illustrated books that date from 1589 and cigar box labels as recent as 1959. More than three hundred fifty years of graphic arts are depicted in a combination of breadth and beauty that makes The John Grossman Collection of Antique Images unique.