About Us

Thank you for visiting oldimprints.com, a gallery of antique prints, antique maps, vintage books, vintage magazines and ephemera. Our business is driven by our love of the combination of great graphics and historical insight which is intrinsic to so much vintage paper. Our stock ranges in date from the 1600s to the 1950s - great design is not limited by date! I have been in business since 1981, and have thrived on (or survived!) the many changes in the book and antique world.  Our business is web based in Portland, Oregon, USA; we also exhibit at several shows a year.

About the word "imprints" in our name:

Imprint refers to the impression made, during the printing process, from the block on the paper, whether the resulting impression is an image or text. Having started out as Nineteenth Century Prints, as our range of inventory widened to books, ephemera and magazines we morphed to Nineteenth Century Imprints to Old Imprints and finally to oldimprints.com as we broadened the timeline of our stock and as our business sales emphasis changed!

On this website you will find:

• antique prints
• antique and vintage maps (with a specialty of pictorial maps)
• a select stock of old books, especially illustrated (children's, travel, natural history, literature etc.)
• ephemera (such as old travel brochures, merchandise catalogs etc.)
• vintage magazines

Order with our secure order system; each item you order is backed by our Customer Satisfaction Guarantee.

Thank you for visiting our website! We hope you will enjoy it and return often. We are always pleased to have your feedback about our website.

Elisabeth Burdon and Craig Clinton

Elisabeth Burdon

I formally went into business selling prints and maps in 1981, with the support and expertise of my husband Craig Clinton. I moved to the Pacific Northwest in 1980 after a life of living many different places. My mother and sister, Barbara and Sally Burdon, have a thriving business selling books on Asia in Canberra, Australia. You may notice a slight emphasis on items to relating to Asia in oldimprints.com stock as well - my parents worked in India and Singapore amongst other places; I have a Bachelor of Arts degree in Asian Studies from the Australian National University (with 3 years of Japanese language - mostly now sadly forgotten!) and after university worked in the Department of Oriental Studies of The British Museum. Since university I have been interested in the use of graphic images to study history, with the added benefit of just being wonderful to look at! I hope that you will get as much pleasure out of my website and the items that I sell as I do!

Craig Clinton

Craig Clinton has worked with Elisabeth Burdon, founder of Oldimprints.com, since its beginnings in 1981. Over the course of nearly thirty years the focus of the business has centered on books, prints, maps, vintage magazines and ephemera, but in recent years the emphasis has increasingly been directed to pictorial maps produced in the first decades of the 20th century by cartographers such as McDonald Gill, Ruth Taylor White, the Lindgren Brothers, Alfred E. Taylor, Elizabeth Shurtleff and other talented mapmakers. Clinton, with a background in theatre studies, has written two biographies of turn of the 20th century stage stars; the first detailed the career of, Mrs. Leslie Carter, a protege of impresario David Belasco and the second, entitled Cora Urquhart Potter - the Victorian Actress as Provocateur, focused on the American actress whose censorious notoriety extended from the United States to England and Australia. Both biographies were published by McFarland and Company.  Clinton's most recent publication is "The 1930s 'Cartomaps' of Frank Antoncich" published in the Winter 2018 issue of The Portolan, the Journal of the Washington Map Society.

Cristina Berretta

Cristina Berretta works one day a week at Oldimprints.com processing orders and seeing that your purchases are carefully packed for shipping. She has a degree in Art History and a minor in Studio Art (see our links page). Currently her favorite finds are the beautiful illustrations of Arthur Rackham and Kay Nielsen.
    
Ms Fluff

In Memoriam August 23 2017
Remembering our much loved shop and companion cat, Ms Fluff
"She made work an even more wonderful place" 
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First to arrive in the morning, reluctant to leave at night, Ms Fluff should be the perfect member of staff. However, we have yet to discover what her duties actually are. To date, she has proved to be the perfect role model in the power of being charming and cute...