About Coffee Posters
A small archive-led shop curating public-domain coffee visuals. Belle Époque advertising, 19th-century botanical plates, Ottoman café lithographs, plantation paintings, and domestic European genre work — all sourced from institutional archives, restored, and prepared for printing.
What we do
We find, restore, annotate, and sell print-ready public-domain coffee visuals. The underlying works are in public domain — we don’t own them and we don’t pretend to. What we sell is the curation, the restoration, the historical write-up, the print preparation, and the catalog framing that turns scattered institutional records into a coherent archive.
What we don’t do
We don’t invent stories about artists or workshops. We don’t romanticize colonial-era iconography. We don’t write “ritual” copy or “elevate your routine” lines. If a piece carries orientalist or labor-history weight, we name it; we don’t dress it up.
Where the material comes from
- Wellcome Collection (London)
- Wikimedia Commons · coffee categories
- Google Cultural Institute
- Museu Paulista da Universidade de São Paulo
- Library of Congress, prints and photographs division
- New York Public Library digital collections
- Internet Archive book illustrations
- Gallica (Bibliothèque nationale de France)
- Rijksmuseum, Smithsonian Open Access, Europeana
Why this archive exists
Almost every great image of coffee — the Belle Époque posters, the 19th-century botanical plates, the Ottoman coffeehouse scenes, the Brazilian fazenda paintings — is already in the public domain, scattered across dozens of institutional archives. In theory anyone can use them. In practice they sit behind clunky search interfaces, mixed with low-resolution scans, stripped of context, and almost never print-ready.
We built Coffee Posters so the visual history of coffee is actually usable — on a real wall, in a real cafe, in a real home — without anyone having to spend weeks digging through library APIs and cleaning up scans. Every piece here is sourced from an open-access institution, restored, annotated, sized for printing, and presented in a coherent archive instead of a search-result soup.
Coffee Posters is a TimberFlare project. We don’t sell anyone’s data, we don’t invent provenance, and we don’t mark up someone else’s heritage as our own work — what you pay for is the curation, the restoration, and the print-ready preparation of work the world already owns.
Contact
Direct correspondence: hello@coffeeposters.com