Customer Reviews

Old-Time Fruit Crate Labels in Full Color (Dover Pictorial Archives)

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I highly recommend this paperback book to anyone who has an eye either for graphic art or rural Americana. At first glance you might wonder what all the fuss is about fruit crate labels, then one particular illustration from Carol Grafton's brilliantly colored collection of 92 designs catches your eye and you are hooked.

As the concise yet historically accurate summary points out on the first page, these colorful, often whimsical, labels were affixed to wooden shipping crates of produce until the mid 1950's when they were replaced by more standardized cardboard boxes. For someone who grew up in agricultural America (as I did) these pictures are nostalgically evocative of a time and place that is disappearing fast. My favorites from this book are the multicolored duck representing Duckwall brand pears from Hood River, Oregon, a pelican made of lettuce, and a Strathmore bagpipe player (who knew there were Scots in Strathmore?).

Many of these same labels have been featured in an exhibit by the California Historical Society in San Francisco (because the lithographers were from local graphic design businesses) and on Antiques Roadshow. Thousands of the original labels themselves can still be purchased at fairly low cost (try internet sites) but this book includes many that are no longer available and so is a good introduction to collecting.

My only regret about this book is that all the pictures couldn't have been the half page size that many are and that there could have been twice as many of them; I would have gladly paid the price. As it is, this volume is an excellent introduction to crate art for a very low price. Maybe there will be a Volume II.

I thought that I was ordering two books with different crate label art in them. I looked at the covers and they looked like different books. In fact the only thing that is different about them is the cover. It was all just a waste of money.

There is definetely no shortage of color in Ms Grafton's book; the illustrations and color on the labels is absolutely stunning. However, I did encounter significant difficulty when using the labels for the purpose of decoupage. First, the paper they are printed on is of a flimsy quality causing the ads to wrinkle & form air bubbles; thus, gluing any of the ads on a surface was very difficult. Second, the ads are too big and too wide. I would have appreciated ads of all variety of sizes, but many are just too big to glue on smaller or narrow boxes. A decoupage expert may know how to handle this kind of paper, but not a beginner.