Every print we sell begins as a scan of a real object — an engraved plate, a hand-coloured lithograph, a watercolor painted from a specimen on a table, a survey chart drawn by someone who took the soundings. All of it is in the public domain. None of it is generated, and none of it is invented.
What we do to it is deliberately small. We crop to the printed image, clean paper foxing and the shadows a scanner leaves behind, correct tone, and set the plate on our own cream ground with a caption in a single consistent style. We do not repaint, redraw, sharpen features that were never there, or add age the original didn't earn. Where a plate has a stain or a fold the paper came by honestly, we usually leave it.
Where each series comes from, and who to thank for it:
Birds of the Great Lakes — John James Audubon, The Birds of America, Havell edition, 1827–1838. Digitised from the double-elephant folio held by the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Upperville, Virginia.
Flora of Ohio — François André Michaux, The North American Sylva (Ohio Buckeye), scanned by the USDA National Agricultural Library; William Hooker, The Paradisus Londinensis, 1805 (Large White Trillium), scanned by the Missouri Botanical Garden for the Biodiversity Heritage Library; Thomas Meehan, The Native Flowers and Ferns of the United States, chromolithographed by L. Prang & Co., Boston, 1879 (Cardinal Flower), scanned by the Boston Public Library.
Pawpaw and Rome Beauty Apple — from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection:
U.S. Department of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection. Special Collections, National Agricultural Library, Beltsville, MD 20705.
The pawpaw was painted by Royal Charles Steadman on 14 October 1924. It appears to be the only pawpaw in a collection of some 7,500 sheets. The Rome Beauty was painted by Deborah Griscom Passmore in 1896, twenty-odd years after the tree that started it grew from a shoot nobody meant to keep.
Charts & Maps of Erie Country — Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. The Lake Erie and Maumee Bay charts are U.S. Lake Survey work of 1852–53; the Toledo panorama is Albert Ruger's, published by J.J. Stoner in 1876; the state map is G.W. Colton's of 1854; and the Great Black Swamp map was drawn by Alexander Bourne, published by John Kilbourne and engraved by Abner Reed in 1820 — four decades before the first ditch was cut, while the swamp was still there to be drawn.
If you are a librarian or archivist and something here is credited wrongly, we would like to know. Write to hello@blackswampprints.com and we will fix it.