Vintage Car Print - 1959 Mercury Station Wagon - from The Family Car On Mars

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

Print size 16 x 24, and consciously formatted to work with a standard size store bought frame, or custom framed as you see fit.


During the late 90s, we amassed a remarkable collection of transportation related material and gathered it together into what became Lost Highways Archive & Research Library, located in a huge and shockingly inexpensive loft space at 3rd and Market Streets in Philadelphia's Old City neighborhood. Though the heart of the collection had to do with the history of living on wheels, that served more as a worthy jumping off point than a confining bookend.

As a result, we curated exhibits within the living on wheels framework, and others that had a connection just 'cause we said so. Hey, what the hell? When you're laying out your own money to support an archive and research library without benefit of association with a more established museum or institute of higher learning, you do what makes you smile.

Because of our long term love of vintage station wagons, and the boxes of materials we'd gathered directly related to just that slice of American culture, we decided to mount an exhibit of original brochures, showroom photos, magazine reviews and everything else paper you could imagine. We acquired a handsome set of 4 matching late 1940s showcases made in Philadelphia and set to work putting the show together. Called THE FAMILY CAR ON MARS, American Station Wagon Design 1956-1962, the show was beautiful, quirky, well researched and fun... so long as you were looking down into the showcases. It became clear fairly quickly that we had to bring strong visuals up to greet visitors, and I set to work digitally restoring a number of great images, printing large as is our wont, and spreading them around.

It was plenty cool, but there was still something missing. What was it I so adored about vintage station wagons? Their accessible space-agedness (made up word... working on it!) was at the heart of that love, so we trolled images from the Hubbel space telescope and married them to some of the best images already in the show. Then I took that to a friend who was a mucky muck at a local firm that prints billboards, who happened to owe me a favor, and had him print this and one other in the same vein room size. Then as you entered the gallery space, you either got it in an instant or you were a lost cause.

Some years later I found what I had thought were the lost files, and we now offer this and its sister print in a much more manageable size!

• 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.