Vintage Car Print - Zeppelin Racer - Belly Tank Racer - Early 20th Century

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 24 x 16 frame, or custom framed as you see fit. For further easy, inexpensive framing options, please feel free to contact us.

This started out as a Valentines card, made in Germany for the American market in the early years of the 20th Century. It opens with much honeycombed red crepe paper to form a 3D cigar shaped body. Pre Hindenberg, the zeppelin was a common shape for toys and regularly used as a design detail in the decorative arts. My father, along with millions of others, watched in awe as an American dirigible worked its way slowly across the sky.

Used here as a streamlined body for an early racer, the style would reemerge after WWII as people recycled the disposable fuel tanks that accompanied bombers and fighter planes on long missions by building frames and motors specifically to work with this suddenly available and amazingly cool body.

The third photo above shows a post war belly tank racer. That print is also available here at The Grand Review on Etsy.

• 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.