season: wintertime

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    Art from ‘Twas the Night before Christmas: A Visit from St. Nicholas (1912)

    This book is an illustrated version of the 1823 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” by (probably) Clement Clarke Moore (see Wikipedia). This version was published in 1912 by Houghton Mifflin, and was illustrated by Jessie Wilcox Smith. There’s some really nice art in this book, so I downloaded scans from the Internet Archive, cropped them, and reuploaded them here to share! This particular edition of the book, including its illustrations, are in the public domain now, so you can use them to make your own art, make little prints for your house (Christmas decorations, perhaps?) and so on. Click…

  • Winter Birds (& Poems) Vintage Cards

    These images are from chromolithograph greeting cards made by L. Prang & Co. in the late 1800s in Boston. The artist was Hector Giacomelli, and the poems are signed E.S.F. You can download these images and use them for art, scrapbooking, junk journaling, etc.– they’re in the public domain in the US and come from the NYPL’s Digital Collection here. I’ve cropped them and made them into individual JPG images, which is what you see here. If you’d like higher quality PNGs at 300 DPI, or if you’d like a high quality printable page of all four images on one…

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    Poem: WINTER-TIME (1895)

    Late lies the wintry sun a-bed,A frosty, fiery sleepy-head;Blinks but an hour or two; and then,A blood-red orange, sets again.Before the stars have left the skies,At morning in the dark I rise;And shivering in my nakedness,By the cold candle, bathe and dress.Close by the jolly fire I sitTo warm my frozen bones a bit;Or with a reindeer-sled, exploreThe colder countries round the door.When to go out, my nurse doth wrapMe in my comforter and cap;The cold wind burns my face, and blowsIts frosty pepper up my nose.Black are my steps on silver sod;Thick blows my frosty breath abroad;And tree and…