ABOUT THE STORE ABOUT THE DESIGNS COPYRIGHT ISSUES AFFILIATE PROGRAM CONTACT US

You may have noticed already that we have a large number of some pretty obscure designs on our shirts, posters, cards and coffee cups. If you stop and think about it - especially with the many styles and sizes of shirts - the cost of maintaining inventory of all those "niche" items would be huge. That's why we don't do it.

About the Store

The Retrovert's products are printed on demand. There's no warehouse full of this stuff anywhere. This is the only way we can offer such a wide variety of designs that, frankly, most of your neighbors don't want.

We use a fulfillment house called CafePress. Cafepress keeps all our high resolution designs on file and those designs just sit there quietly until you place your order. Cafepress processes your payment, manufactures the goods, and ships them to you. If there's a problem with your order you contact them directly and they accept the return or replace the item.

All of these items are produced using one variation or another on dye sublimation printing. Much more detailed information is available from the Cafepress pages.

For the most part, once you've placed your order you deal directly with them rather than with us. But every now and then, if you do feel there's a problem you may want to email us directly so we can also inquire on your behalf. In fact we encourage you to drop us a line anyhow if you'd like our occasional updates about theRetrovert.com. In the normal course of events we would have no way to contact you directly, because Cafepress does not share your email address with us. We have shifty eyes.

About the Designs

All our designs are created at a resolution of 300 DPI using scanned images. All of those images are based on surviving examples of vintage graphics.

Quite a lot of these images come from our own collection of vintage graphics on what's called "ephemera", or paper products. The magazine covers, sheet music covers, crate labels, and World's Fair postcards all come from our collection. The WPA poster art - which we sure wish came from our own collection - has been obtained from the Library of Congress.

We take a lot of care in selectively retouching these images. The amount and type of retouching varies from collection to collection because we try to decide what is most appropriate in each case. Of the material in the store it's the magazine covers that have received the greatest amount of retouching, and it's probably the sheet music covers that have received the least.

In all cases we try to erase gross damage. These objects are quite old and are often worn. They may have tears and dog-eared edges, even rips and abrasion. When it comes to the Modern Mechanix & Inventions covers we have tried to eliminate that damage, "undo" their faded colors, and make them look nearly new. (A before and after example is shown below.) This seems right to us because this material is "new" by nature, being about the future, and because the images themselves are so much like paintings.

Before and After Samples

It's quite a challenge to repair missing parts of these images without changing their character. Printed material has a fine network of halftone dots that give the images a particular texture, so in many cases we copy and paste an undamaged area to cover up damage. Elsewhere, we need to paint new color into a damage spot and then add texture to it. There are many such little decisions to make on each picture as we try to make it young again. It all takes time and, we hope, skill and experience. We truly love this material and we always hope to restore it without changing it.

At the other extreme, when we sat down with our vintage sheet music collection we felt that those covers present a different sort of problem. You can't really separate them from their content - the songs inside - and so, to us at least, they remain three dimensional objects. In this case we chose to repair gross defects, stains, stamps, marks, and so on, but not to try to make them look entirely new. Edge wear remains because we want them to keep their character as the covers of something wonderful inside. The designs themselves are given soft shadows so that they still look like the booklet covers that they really are.

Some of the most satisfying restorations were those we did on the WPA poster art. We worked from scanned transparencies, mainly, so in addition to repairing fading and wear we had to eliminate the texture of the film grain - the originals of these designs, being silk screen prints, used the perfectly flat colors and gradients that are a characteristic of that medium. Our only regret here is that not all of the designs were available in high enough resolutions to use on shirts and posters.

We hope that we've made good choices and decisions in our restorations. It's our goal to show this material off at its best, and we hope we've managed to do that.

Copyright Issues

We always try to establish that the work we base these designs on has reverted to the public domain before we restore it. Even if this weren't the right thing to do, think about the labor involved in restoring an image and applying it to these products...! We'd hate to have done that, and then have to stop using a design.

The case is very clear in the case of the WPA posters, which - as government projects funded with tax dollars - were in the public domain from the day they were made. The Worlds' Fair postcards, magazine and sheet music covers, and crate labels are all "orphaned" designs. Prior to the late 1970's copyrights had to be renewed every twenty-eight years, and could be renewed only a limited number of times; so when an organization or company went out of business these copyright renewals often lapsed. In other cases the work was so old when it came up for renewal that a company didn't feel that it was worth the cost.

Could we have missed something? It's possible. If you believe you know of evidence that one of these designs is not "orphaned", as it seems to be, then please contact us and let us know where you think we've gone wrong.