Plenty of Nothing

Kit

Grim things were happening on Sick Steer Trail when hard-boiled gang moll Kit met world-weary Hampton one night on a snowy ridge in Colorado in the short story "$2,000 Reward, A Drama On The Top Of The World," written by Alma and Paul Ellerbe, and published in Cosmopolitan, March 1925 (not 1924 as everyone on the internet believes) with illustrations by Dean Cornwell. Read their desperate struggle toward redemption and the inevitable proposal of marriage here. The top image is a modern photo of Cornwell's original oil painting; the bottom two are screen grabs from the scanned magazine, showing the state of 1920s colour reprography. Kit’s Colt 45 automatic looks way too modern for a Western but was in fact in service from 1911 onward.

Renaissance Vegetius

A woodcut, probably by Pater von Mainz, from a c. 1512 edition of Vegetius, De re militari, showing some fanciful gear that Vegetius never heard of. Source.

Spatenbräu

I once purchased an Octoberfest-scale beer stein just because it had this attractive logo on it. It's the trademark of the Munich brewery Spatenbräu and was designed in 1884 by Otto Hupp, an artist who specialized in 16th-century German heraldry. That shovel really looks like it was drawn by Albrecht Dürer or one of his contemporaries. The GS stands for Gabriel Sedlmayr who bought the medieval brewery in 1807 and started it down the road to lager supremacy. Check out Hupp's series of Kaffee HAG albums here.

Vladimir Lebedev

Source.

Bosnian Waitress by Mucha

Source. Read about Mucha's Bosnian commission here.

Antonio Petroccelli

June 1937 cover of Fortune magazine by illustrator Antonio Petroccelli. Source. See also.

Portuguese Sardine Cans

Source.

Penguin Gundam

Designing Penguin covers for manga classics is a thing now. Source.

Norm Eastman

The CBC has an article on the career of Norm Eastman, who did his art schooling at Mount Allison in the 1950s and went on to a career of illustrating men's magazines, specializing in semi-clad women with machine guns. This self-portrait is set in a dorm room in Trueman House, which looked just the same in the 1970s and indeed up until 2006.

Jaime Hernandez New Yorker Cover