An archive, gathered over three decades
Brochures, posters, luggage labels, ocean-liner timetables, automotive road maps, and the printed graphic-design journals of inter-war Europe — kept and catalogued by David Levine across more than thirty years of collecting.
The pieces shown here are a small selection from a wider archive of more than ten thousand items. David's eye reached from the canonical names of European graphic design — Herbert Matter, Eric Nitsche, Cassandre — through to the unsigned vernacular work of railway companies, steamship lines, and small-city tourist boards. Each was sought out, catalogued, and scanned by hand.
— From the collection
The wider archive — more than six thousand photographs catalogued and uploaded by David himself — is still online at flickr.com/photos/davidelevine.
— In Memory
Collector, archivist, friend of graphic design.
David's collecting began almost by accident. In 1992, in an antiquarian bookstore near the British Museum in London, he bought a small travel brochure. "I bought it thinking 'how interesting,'" he later recalled. "Little did I know…"
Weeks later, walking through Prague's Old Town, he found another antiquarian shop — bins of brochures, ocean-liner timetables, luggage labels, road maps, advertising leaves from the 1920s and 1930s. "That was it," he said. "I was hooked."
Over the next three decades he assembled what writer Maisie Skidmore, in It's Nice That, called "one of the most extraordinary archives of graphic ephemera out there" — each item carefully scanned, dated, tagged, and given a short note in his own hand. He had a particular ear for the great mid-century designers — Herbert Matter, Eric Nitsche, A. M. Cassandre — and an equal generosity toward the anonymous draughtsmen working for small railway lines and provincial tourist boards.
He shared almost everything he found. Six thousand five hundred and seventy-nine photographs went up to his Flickr; a free gallery at travelbrochuregraphics.com ran for more than twenty years; a brief storefront, designreklama.com, offered prints to anyone who loved the work as much as he did.
He is missed by his sister Jodi, his mother Adele, by his cousin Terry, and by everyone who learned to look more carefully at a piece of folded paper because of him. The collection is now cared for by his family — a record of one person's quiet, patient attention to the printed graphic traditions of an earlier century.
— Inquiries
For inquiries about the collection — purchases, exhibition loans, press, or questions from fellow collectors — please write to David's sister Jodi Levine.
Proceeds support David's family.