Royalty free - public domain - vintage -antique - historical
naturalist - botanical - medical scientific - and more!
Printable - Downloadable
naturalist - botanical - medical scientific - and more!
Printable - Downloadable
Welcome to Vintage Printable! Click below for preview pages of free, public domain, royalty free vintage or antique illustration, selected from among library and university digital image sources. Once you click from the previews, you can go to my full photofile with high resolution, downloadable, printable images, and search by tag or category.
Here's more information about Vintage Printable. Enjoy!
Textile design, India (click to go to enlarge)
Swivelchair -- my hobby is collecting digital images of vintage naturalist and scientific illustration. I have gone through public domain sources of vintage images and selected the ones that I liked -- and I hope you enjoy them. Of course, there are links below to many of the libraries, museums, and government sources I visited, for you to select your own images.
Vintage PrintableTM has hundreds of digital images, all public domain (see the Wikimedia Commons explanation of copyright and fair use). The images here are believed to be either out of copyright or not copyrighted (because they were created for the U.S. government, according to their source). Be sure to visit the links below for great sources of digital images from public libraries and archives, museums and government.
If anyone would like to request that I take down an image, please contact me.
Please know that the images can be downloaded freely, but if you are copying my collection, please attribute and redirect to: Vintageprintable.com
Vintage PrintableTM collection by vintageprintable.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.vintageprintable.comTM.
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Printing tips: Most of the images are high resolution, however some are not. Be sure to preview the image before printing. Some of the images I retouched to get rid of original water stains -- so please review in high resolution to make sure my retouching won't show up on your print. If you would like me to fix any of the images, just contact me and I'll have another go at the re-touch.
To make a giant wall poster out of single sheets of regular paper, go to "Rasterbator":
A limited amount of DIY ideas (because you know what to do): I am partial to the flying squirrel series. (See the illustration below, the squirrels are smiling). Three illustrations, framed in some faux-malachite frames painted in a rare burst of both creativity and energy, look great. Here is almost exactly how
the faux malachite turned out - total cost per frame about $10 or less for 11 x 14, with print, mat, and lucite overlay (instead of glass). (The malachite photo links to some instructions Al's Home Improvement -- I don't know Al, but the instructions seem just right, plus, who doesn't love putting "z's" in "sizzors"? More z's should be used in words. Plus they are 10 points when you play scrabble. Thanks Al!)
Printable greeting cards: DIY greeting cards are another hit chez Swivelchair, mostly because we wait until the last minute on someone's birthday or the holidays. A card featuring reindeer milking pretty much writes itself, no? ("Happy Festivus - hope you milk it for all you can!")
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This domain: This domain "vintageprintable.com" or "www.vintageprintable.com" is the landing page. I had a googlepages, "vintageprintable.googlepages.com", with many of the same illustrations. My on line public photo gallery with the full set of hi-res (usually) images is here: photos.vintageprintable.com
Privacy policy: I don't care who you are and won't give out your IP information unless required by law, so if you are on the lam, don't come to this site. I won't send you anything because (a) I have nothing to say; (b) I don't know you; (c) how rude; (d) I have no idea how to send mass e mails and get through spam; (e) I'll stop here, but you get the drift.
Commercial disclosure: I am an individual person, not a corporate shill. I will put up, at some point, relevant ads on the site, especially for printing posters, t-shirts, picture frames, paper, ink, etc. mostly because you can decorate for cheap by printing these illustrations out on high quality paper. [In process - designing some T-shirts, mugs, etc. for your convenience out of Cafe Press -- but you could download the digital image and use any service you like].
To top of home page
Vintage PrintableTM has hundreds of digital images, all public domain (see the Wikimedia Commons explanation of copyright and fair use). The images here are believed to be either out of copyright or not copyrighted (because they were created for the U.S. government, according to their source). Be sure to visit the links below for great sources of digital images from public libraries and archives, museums and government.
If anyone would like to request that I take down an image, please contact me.
Please know that the images can be downloaded freely, but if you are copying my collection, please attribute and redirect to: Vintageprintable.com
Vintage PrintableTM collection by vintageprintable.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.Based on a work at www.vintageprintable.comTM.
To top of home page
Printing tips: Most of the images are high resolution, however some are not. Be sure to preview the image before printing. Some of the images I retouched to get rid of original water stains -- so please review in high resolution to make sure my retouching won't show up on your print. If you would like me to fix any of the images, just contact me and I'll have another go at the re-touch.
To make a giant wall poster out of single sheets of regular paper, go to "Rasterbator":
"The Rasterbator creates huge, rasterized images from any picture.
Upload an image, print the resulting multi-page pdf file and assemble
the pages into extremely cool looking poster up to 20 meters in size."
A limited amount of DIY ideas (because you know what to do): I am partial to the flying squirrel series. (See the illustration below, the squirrels are smiling). Three illustrations, framed in some faux-malachite frames painted in a rare burst of both creativity and energy, look great. Here is almost exactly how
the faux malachite turned out - total cost per frame about $10 or less for 11 x 14, with print, mat, and lucite overlay (instead of glass). (The malachite photo links to some instructions Al's Home Improvement -- I don't know Al, but the instructions seem just right, plus, who doesn't love putting "z's" in "sizzors"? More z's should be used in words. Plus they are 10 points when you play scrabble. Thanks Al!)
To top of home page
This domain: This domain "vintageprintable.com" or "www.vintageprintable.com" is the landing page. I had a googlepages, "vintageprintable.googlepages.com", with many of the same illustrations. My on line public photo gallery with the full set of hi-res (usually) images is here: photos.vintageprintable.com
Privacy policy: I don't care who you are and won't give out your IP information unless required by law, so if you are on the lam, don't come to this site. I won't send you anything because (a) I have nothing to say; (b) I don't know you; (c) how rude; (d) I have no idea how to send mass e mails and get through spam; (e) I'll stop here, but you get the drift.
Commercial disclosure: I am an individual person, not a corporate shill. I will put up, at some point, relevant ads on the site, especially for printing posters, t-shirts, picture frames, paper, ink, etc. mostly because you can decorate for cheap by printing these illustrations out on high quality paper. [In process - designing some T-shirts, mugs, etc. for your convenience out of Cafe Press -- but you could download the digital image and use any service you like].
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LINKS TO DIGITAL IMAGE SOURCES:
This is an attempted tribute page to all the librarians and digital archivists world over, because what they have done is truly remarkable, and we're all the beneficiaries.
Google: When all else fails in life, Google it.
A Google search for "rare books" can turn up some interesting sites. Here is the "Rare Book School" at UVA's site. Here's the "Rare Books and Manuscripts" section at the American Library Association web site.
The Rare Book Room is a terrific source of rare books imaged -- but images are not down-loadable or printable.
Google image search: often you can find public domain works by searching the subject first.
Google book search: use advance book search. You can download entire books as PDF, and then cut images into your digital imaging program. Or just print out the page of the PDF and use scissors.
Project Gutenberg: "Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today." Many of the books are illustrated and you can search for public domain illustrations.
Here is the Library of Congress Rare Book digitized collection.
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Now for the experts:
The Digital Librarian : a librarian's choice of the best of the Web is maintained by Margaret Vail Anderson, a librarian in Cortland, New York, and is packed - PACKED - with links, descriptions and recommendations. Thank you Ms. Anderson.
Below is a deceptively simple table from University of California, Santa Barbara - click on the links and it will take you up and away to the UCSB page, with miles and miles of links and full descriptions of the sources listed (the curator is listed as Jackie Spafford and the assistant curator is listed as Christine Fritsch-Hammes):
Museums
Search Engines & Portals
Licensed Archives
Maps
Asian Resources
Library & Government Collections
University Collections & Databases
Architecture
Middle Eastern Resources
African Resources
Miscellaneous
Yale has a great page on links to History of Medicine digital collections.
Free e books AU/NZ has a terrific page of free digital libraries world wide.
Flickr has many creative commons royalty free digital images, and groups that collect vintage illustration, (which may or may not be public domain), like the Flickr Vintage Illustration group photo pool. Search the Flickr groups for other groups with vintage illustration. Here are some vintage bat illustrations I put up a while ago for the Vintage Halloween group. (I believe these were Haekel illustrations -- see the bat faces which have expressions. I cut out some of these as separate images for enlarging.)
Botanical:
Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation: Catalog of Botanical Art Collection
"The collection of botanical art and illustration in the Department of
Art at the Hunt Institute is one of the world's largest and most
broadly representative. Users can search this database by artist's name
and nationality, taxon and artwork title."
This link is to an interface with just about every field you can imagine. I wonder if the Hunt Institute is related to Hunt's Ketchup? Anyone know? Is there a history about the tomatoes? (E-mail me and I'll post the information.) The images, however, are not available in hi-res, and many are still subject to copyright, or claimed to be.Scott Russell through the Department of Botany and Microbiology of the University of Oklahoma has Scott's Botanical Links - a very detailed and awesome list, but some may not be updated.
Here are individual links, and I'll make an ongoing list with my comments.
New York Public Library Digital Gallery Home: This is my very favorite source for naturalist animal illustrations. Here is the page for "Classic Illustrated Zoologies and Related Works, 1550-1900."
The British Museum Images collection is really great, except you can't download high resolution images of 2 -dimensional works that are out of copyright.
The Fine Art Museum of San Francisco has 82,000+ high resolution digital images, in a searchable database.
The USDA National Agricultural Library has some great public domain botanical illustrations.
Welcome Foundation Library searchable medical images are "2000 years of human culture."
Yale University Digital Images from a variety of libraries can be cross searched.
Some I'm checking out:
Virtual Library Museums Page a distributed directory of on line museums
More to come. . .
