Vintage Car Print - 1942 Mercury Eight - Post December 7 1941

Treasures from THE AUTOMOTIVE COLLECTION at Lost Highways Archive & Research Library. By exclusive arrangement with The Grand Review.

Print size 18 x 24, and consciously formatted to work with a standard size store bought frame, or custom framed as you see fit.

Here is a fairly remarkable image that snatches you up and drops you right into a very precise moment in American and world history. It is both beautiful and ominous, and it straddles an undeniable crossroads in the lives of our parents and grandparents.

As we all know, the car models for next year hit the market before the current calendar year is up, so the 1942 Mercury would have been advertised aplenty and likely on the lots by the time December 7, 1941 hit. This brochure, in mood and tone and with the addition of the American bomber clearly in direct reference to a state of war, would have been produced after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Being both distant relatives of Admiral Kimmel and close relatives to Elizabeth Gray Vining, American Quaker tutor to the young Crown Prince Akihito at the end of the war, and having my namesake uncle lost over Kwajalein, the Pacific War has kept a special place in this particular home. The 42 Mercury was pulled from the assembly lines as all factories switched to production of war material, but hadn't yet been pulled when the artwork for this brochure was created, The image captures a moment where trouble had arrived... there is no doubt about it... and we were perhaps holding on to the comforting normalcy of the Merc as we simultaneously let go of everything else and entered World War II.

• Handmade item
• Materials: Art stock enhanced matte paper, archival ink
• Made to order
• Only ships within United States.

SHIPPING

All prints are shipped in a sturdy mailing tube for $8, which covers postage, tube and S & H.

BUYING MORE THAN ONE PRINT? Add a second print or any number thereafter of this or any other prints in our catalog and shipping is still just $8, total!!!

International shipping is available and reasonable. Please contact us for details.

A NOTE ON OUR PROCESS, OUR CHOICES AND THE QUALITY OF THE GRAPHIC CRAFTSMANSHIP THAT GOES INTO OUR PRINTS.

Every print we deem exciting enough to present to the public via our Etsy store or available here at our studio has gone through a number of steps. The first of those is always discovering and falling in love with an obscure image, always an original that we can hold in our hands. That image is speaking to us, sometime screaming “Don’t leave me here. See what I am, what I was, what I can be, what I SHOULD be!”

There is a real sense of excitement involved, and a great many smiles and knowing grins when we make that deal and bring that ancient print, that battered photo, that scrap of ephemera that contains some scrap of genius from an unknown commercial artist home with us, knowing already how we mean to approach its restoration.

There is the heady promise of a further hunt just as real as what drags a weekend fisherman out of bed at 3AM to work a favorite brook as we start our research, looking for that great backstory, and both ready and willing to tumble down as many rabbit holes as are revealed to us to get that story.

Then there is a meticulous digital restoration that is as often as much fun as riding a vintage Moto Guzzi on a winding coastal road. I don’t care if that sounds crazy, it really is like jumping in the saddle! So many choices, so many chances to take to subtly or spectacularly give new life to otherwise permanently obscure images.

This dedication and the ongoing rush of joy in the accomplishment of it, and the opportunity to share the results in our studio and here on Etsy, is the fire of passion that keeps these engines roaring. We make every effort to ensure our customers are not just satisfied but thrilled, and we happily stand 100% behind our work.