A cut and paste Christmas

Holiday season fans will enjoy this all color collection of period illustrations. 361 graphic examples of Santa (lots and lots) gift tags, children, angels, decorative friezes and cartouches, lettering and more. I thought it was an interesting mix though it seems that most of the material would be pre-1940.

You can enjoy the book as it is, pleasantly laid out with a slight drop shadow on many of the illustrations which makes them appear to hover on the page but nicely the book comes with a CD-ROM with all the art which you can scroll through individually on your monitor and Dover have gone the extra mile by having ninety examples as card templates for easy printing on card stock. Twenty pieces of art can be printed as postcards as well.

One feature I did like were several examples of wrapping paper design with step-and-repeat motifs, these are used as whole page backgrounds on many pages. All the art in the book is numbered so it's easy to find on the disc.

My only criticism is that there is not much material from the Fifties or Sixties (maybe a volume two?) but apart from that I thought this was a lovely collection of Christmas graphics, enjoyable just by turning the pages or using the individual graphics on the disc to create and print your own festive designs.

Vintage Christmas (Dover Pictura Electronic Clip Art) is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

Title spread and CD-ROM (tucked in an envelope bound into the back pages)

All of the backgrounds throughout the book are on the disc as wrapping paper designs.

Left: the four bits of type are on the disc individually.

Some other Christmas books I've enjoyed.

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