Summer Harvest 2015 Forever Stamps — Vintage Crate Label Art, Booklet of 20

Issue facts

Issued: July 11, 2015 at the California State Fair, Cal Expo
First Day City: Sacramento, CA
Printed by: Ashton Potter
Method: Offset printing in booklets of 20

Where the artwork comes from

Michael Doret designed and drew every stamp in the set, taking his cues from vintage shipping crate labels, seed packets and catalogs.

Why those labels existed

As the produce trade became a serious interstate business in the 19th century, growers had to find ways to stand out. The answer was the crate label: skilled lithographers were hired to produce them, and bright yellow lemons and hard red tomatoes did the selling from the side of a wooden box.

How they were printed

Stone lithography was standard before the turn of the century — designs etched by hand into limestone, inked, and pressed onto heavy paper. Steel and photo-offset lithography made the work faster and cheaper in the next century, and by the late 1940s the practice peaked, with a single lithography firm sometimes employing a hundred artists to keep pace.

It ended quickly. Within a decade, preprinted cardboard boxes replaced wooden crates and the labels became unnecessary.

Plenty survive in collections and antique shops. Taken together they form a record of American agricultural advertising across three-quarters of a century — now studied under the name agro-lithography.

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