Past Print

Sunday, December 16, 2012

Christmas cards from Paper Moon Graphics

Paper Moon Graphics was a Los Angeles based greetings card and stationary company started in 1977. What set them apart from other companies was their creative use of several young airbrush artists who had made LA the center of a bright and breezy illustrative style.

During the seventies and into the eighties their airbrush work was everywhere. You couldn’t pick up a consumer magazine without seeing an airbrush illustration used for an editorial article. These Paper Moon Christmas cards (6.75 by 4.6 inches) were published between 1977 and 1981 and show off the talents of the following artists: Terry Lamb, Dave McMacken, Dave Willardson, Roger Bergendorff, Pam Wall, Alan Hashimoto, Pat Bailey, Jim Evans, Don Ivan Punchatz, Peter Palombi, Julie Peterson, Denis Mukai, Bob Rodriguez, Kim Whitesides, Deborah Ross.

Though they are not that old I think they have a lovely period feel that contemporary digital work doesn’t really capture.

All illustrations copyright Paper Moon Graphics.

Friday, December 7, 2012

Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer pop-up book / 1939

A bit of seasonal cheer on Past Print. The story was written by Robert May for Montgomery Ward and given away in their stores during the 1939 holiday season. This pop-up Rudolph was published in 1939 by Adprint in London in conjunction with Maxton books in New York. I think the 1939 Maxton version was just an illustrated book, they published the pop-up one in 1950. The story still seems to be a children’s favorite, probably because the song is always played at Christmas.

I had the book when I was small and surprisingly it doesn’t show much wear even though it must have been looked through dozens of times over the years. Now my grandchildren are frequent page-turners at Christmas time.

The illustrations by Marion Guild have a lovely warm appeal just like the words. I always thought the addition of the plane, on the second pop-up, gave the story a contemporary feel of the times back then. Her pop-ups are fairly basic but cleverly worked out though nothing like the intricacies of Robert Sabuda’s best Christmas pop-up books from the last decade. I think his best was A winter's tale (ISBN 978-0689853630) full of amazing paper engineering and on the last spread the use of colored LED lights.