Black Swamp Prints is a family of nine in the Black Swamp region of northwest Ohio, and a long-standing habit of looking things up.
The Great Black Swamp was fifteen hundred square miles of wetland — impassable for half of every year, and drained between 1859 and 1885 by hand-dug ditch and clay tile. It is the reason the roads here run arrow-straight and the fields drain the way they do. It is also gone. Our house stands on its bed. Naming a print shop after a vanished swamp is a way of keeping the receipt.
There are nine of us — two parents and seven kids — and the shop is run out of the house, at the kitchen table, between other jobs. The kids are homeschooled, so a good part of the year goes on naming things out loud: the birds at the feeder, the trillium in April, whatever the creek is doing. They are not shy about which bird is best. The collection came out of that habit more than out of any business plan, and we hope that shows.
The prints are restored antique plates: Audubon's birds as they were engraved in the 1820s and 30s, botanical plates from the great nineteenth-century floras, fruit watercolors painted by USDA artists back when identifying an apple was federal work, and survey charts and maps of Lake Erie, the Maumee, and Ohio itself. Every one of them is a real object that a real person made, and every one is in the public domain.
What we do to them is deliberately small. We crop to the printed image, clean the foxing and the shadows a scanner leaves behind, correct tone, and set the plate on a cream ground with a caption in one consistent style, so that fifteen plates from six different centuries of printing hang together on a wall. We do not repaint, redraw, invent detail, or add age the paper didn't earn. Where a plate carries a stain or a fold it came by honestly, we usually leave it. If an original is too soft to print at a given size, we don't sell it at that size — there are six plates in this collection you cannot buy at the largest size for exactly that reason.
They are printed to order on archival matte paper by a U.S. printer, and shipped rolled in a tube. Nothing sits in a warehouse. Nothing is a scan of a scan.
If you grew up here, some of these will be familiar in a way that's hard to explain to someone who didn't. That's the whole idea.