One Sheet: May's Choice Vegetable Seeds

One Sheet is a series about single objects from the boxes.

A seed catalogue on a t-shirt

May’s Choice Vegetable Seeds. A turn-of-the-century catalogue cover — the kind of thing that arrived through the post in January so a farmer could plan a garden.

Printed as an iron-on transfer, roughly seventy years later, for people to wear.

How we know it was deliberate

This is the sheet that proved the pattern. The original listing on our own site said so: “Turn of Century Posters as iron-ons.”

Written decades ago by whoever first catalogued it — and it tells us the seller understood there was a line here, a category, not a one-off. That single phrase is what sent us looking, and we’ve since found eight of them.

Sometimes the best evidence in an archive is a note somebody left for themselves and forgot about.

Why a seed catalogue

Because in the mid-seventies, American graphic design fell in love with its own past. Nostalgia for the turn of the century ran through everything — typography, packaging, restaurant decor, album sleeves. Somebody in the transfer trade read the room correctly and started mining pre-war commercial art.

The joke, if there is one, is that a Victorian seed advertisement is now itself a period piece twice over: an antique reproduction that has become an antique.

See the sheet · The whole antique-poster line