Everything on our site can be purchased in person as well. We do same day shipping as well as private shopping appointments.
Address
136 E De La Guerra
Business Hours
Wednesday - Saturday
12 pm - 5 pm
Thursdays
12 pm - 7 pm
The Museum Store offers a variety of thought provoking and beautiful items that highlight our city's rich heritage: hard-to-find books, historic images, jewelry made by local artists, educational books and vintage toys for children, museum and exhibition publications, as well as unique gifts.
Two new books, Vintage: California Wine Labels of the 1930s and Well Aged: California Whiskey and Spirits Labels of the 1930s, illuminate a near-forgotten artisanal legacy tucked among the archives of the California Historical Society's Kemble Collections on Western Printing and Publishing. In the midst of the Great Depression, hundreds of thousands of bottles of mass-manufactured, highly alcoholic wines and liquors invoked fantasies of the good life—due in no small part to their inebriating contents, but also aided by exquisite labels produced on an industrial scale by the anonymous designers working for the Lehmann Printing and Lithographing Company of San Francisco. Mass production does not typically correlate with the finest quality, but the Lehmann factory defied expectations: working within a house style defined by vivid hues, adventurous lettering, and Art Deco sensibility, these labels exhibited a seemingly inexhaustible creativity executed at the highest standards of craftsmanship. And as much as the labels advertised a particular brand, they also marketed the myth of California. The Lehmann artists frequently employed images of a romanticized past, whether medieval or Mission era, to brand the product as the fruit of an idyllic paradise free from the ills of history or even contemporary anxieties. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the beautiful labels gathered in Vintage and Well Aged reveal startling contrasts to—and similarities with—today's design-driven culture.
Everything on our site can be purchased in person as well. We do same day shipping as well as private shopping appointments.
Business Hours
Wednesday - Saturday
12 pm - 5 pm
Thursdays
12 pm - 7 pm