Clip Art Before Computers ??

The forgotten early history of clip art speaks to a time in which the medium was distributed through literal books in which the art could be clipped out. No computers needed.

Hey all! As we pointed out last week,?Lesser Tedium is finishing up its run?on Friday, in favor of?Tedium. (Though subscribers seem to be subscribing … so who knows?!) Anyway, enjoy these stories as we close out our run.

We think of clip art?being tied specifically to the computer, with its most iconic era being the early 1990s.

But the truth of the matter is, there was always a need for visuals that looked good but didn’t break the bank. There just wasn’t always a computerized process to accept them.

In the 1950s and 1960s, it was common in the publishing space for newspapers and magazines to utilize clip art produced by a handful of small companies that specialized in the work. One key firm was closely associated with this style: Harry Volk, which faded into history long before computers became a thing.

A reason for this is that these illustrations dated themselves instantly. They were line drawings of a very specific type—semi-realistic drawings of people and things that were too good for the comics page, but not good enough for fine art. If you’ve seen the style, you know it well.

It’s high quality, but it is forever dated to its timeframe. It looks like the 1950s and 1960s, and that became a knock against it. On top of that, it was designed for advertising, which meant that its value was?honestly meant to depreciate. It was commerce, dressed up as art.

This content was not built to last forever, and much of it was thrown out. But on the plus side, at least one person realized that there was immense artistic value to the whole endeavor: Onetime?New York Times?advertising employee Bart Solenthaler, who launched the Bart&Co. Historic Clip Art Collection,?much of which is available on Flickr.

Why’d he have it? Well, he was tasked with throwing this stuff in the dumpster.

“I asked if I could have the clip art rather than throwing it in the trash. And the rest, as they say, is history,”?he told the website?Flashbak.

Eventually, this approach to clip art bled to consumers—a notable example of this was Dover’s ready-to-use clip art series, which was built for the mass market rather than advertising departments.

It was only a matter of time before the desktop publishing era pushed clip art into the domain of the computer.

? Wanna learn more??Check out our 2018 piece on the history of clip art, “Clippy Couture.”