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The Harry Volk, Jr. Studio produced a lot of clip art during the middle of the last century. There is a tremendous collection of them on Flickr and here are just a few to peek at.
Via Wikipedia:
"Volk Clip Art, Inc., better known as the Harry Volk Jr. Art Studio, was an advertising art studio specializing in artwork meant to be sold for commercial use in print. Using a subscription based service, designers and journalists had the option to be sent monthly booklets of free-to-use artwork to use within their own publications.[1] With the purchase of the service (or any specific booklet) came the permission to use the artwork included for any purpose, personal or commercial.[2] This opened the doorway for many smaller news outlets, designers, and businesses to add artwork to their print without having to hire their own illustrators. Volk booklets were available both by mail and in print shops"
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2 comments:
I worked at the San Jose Mercury News from the mid 70s to around 2013. Much of that was as a copywriter in Marketing / PR, where I also pasted up lower-end projects such as flyers, filler ads, marketing materials, etc. I eventually had a rudimentary command of point rules, proportion wheels, press type, and those devices that applied hot liquid wax to back of cold type and images (although brown jars of rubber cement with brushes built into the lids remained on many desks). Also the clip art resources available in the art department.
They had custom metal file drawers full of alphabetized Volk booklets; now wondering if they subscribed or at some point bought the files pre-filled. As you show they were already sort of retro looking, so the art was sometimes used for comic or campy effect. There were also full page publications with big ad headers and frames as well as seasonal imagery. People rarely cut them up -- we had good copiers that could resize B&W images.
By the time I left the artists were all working on screens (except when they hand drew or painted an illustrative element). There was a period of comparatively cheap art and stock photos on CD ROMs before the market migrated online. I wish I'd grabbed some of the Volks as souvenirs. Also that one CD ROM of vintage photos, which we used for one campaign and then shelved because a local entertainment weekly was making heavier use of the same disc.
I'm curious to know the names of the artists who did the realistic-style illustrations here. They strongly resemble the "slick comic strip" work coming out of Johnstone & Cushing. Good, solid work whoever did it. I especially like the firefighter illo.
DBenson, I was a pasteup artist for a magazine in Palo Alto during the early and mid-70s, so your comment brought back fond memories of waxers, prestype (always came up one "E" short just before the deadline), and rubber cement. Personally I preferred rubber cement to the waxer because the sticky wax was @#%@ difficult to scrape off the mounting board when you had to move a piece of art. I remember frequently you'd have a column of text run a couple of words long, so you'd use an X-Acto knife to cut the final lines into individual words, then trim the space between them until the text fit.
I miss a lot of the hands-on art experience but I'm perfectly happy to let a computer do the copyfitting.
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