The name bewilders me, but the fonts enchant, especially on "tomatoes".

Ignorance: egregious.  Design: near-flawless.  What does a collector do?  (One purchases bulk lots unknowingly containing beautiful but racist can labels, in this case.)

I'm so fond of vintage Sunkist that sometimes I forget Dole's triumphs in the '20s through '40s.  1938 here:

Approximately 0% of magazine ads produced in the last 50 years are that attractive, if you ask Inflammammal.  And it's not even necessarily the best, just the one I looked at most recently.

As I've not mentioned it before, and as its packaging is rightfully among the top handful of American commercial design icons:

Postmarked in 1949; the writer notes he is having a "swell" time.

I don't have anything to add to it, today; these German cherries are beautiful.  The leaf edges, too, the gently curling ones.

Postmarked 1900, "A California Paradox", oranges growing with snowy peaks behind.  (Indeed I live in the greatest state.)  

Sometimes, the humble seed packet took a leap toward greatness.

Lacks the detail I usually crave, yet still perfectly captures persimmonness.  This is the tsuru-no-ko or stork's egg persimmon, depicted in an illustration for the US Dept. of Agriculture in 1890, painted by William Prestele.

In 1900, even ketchup ads had smoothy class, in the right hands.

People seem to use the word at any opportunity so it's a bit shopworn, but this, this is bucolic.  How I love an overbright vintage postcard!

Cover of an 1875 seed catalog - not from my collection - that approaches but does not cross the line into garishness.  I just wish my source had scans of the inside as well.

Radiant (and bygone?) grapes from an 1890 seed catalog.

Designers of turn-of-the-century and just-after cigarette cards really knew how to pack a lot of beauty into their tiny spaces (typically around 2" by 3", sometimes taller as in this example).

Another nice job, Candy Council admen of the early '50s.

This German postcard depicts the midnight summer sun in Advent Bay, Norway.  It (let alone the phenomenon itself) is so beautiful it can, at the right moments like just now, make Inflammammal's head loll/neck weaken.

An unattributed image from the Harvard online Herbaria collections.  It's flawless obviously, and that one little seed at bottom right somehow heart-rending.

These strawberries should be too stylized for my taste, but instead they're among my very favorite fruit illustrations.  I look at them almost every day and find them calming.  I don't own an original or even a copy, just this digital form.  Van de Mark, 1868:

As they date back only to 1969, the images in the Oxford Book of Food Plants lack the age they require to really move Inflammammal.  But this's a fine, fine watermelon; if I mistakenly believed this image to be 100 years older it'd probably make me cry a little.  Silly business, nostalgia!

These pears have nothing to be ashamed about either (same source):

A nice little Dutch number, bit restrained for my taste but still handsome.