Vintage Fruit Labels emblemVintage Fruit LabelsPrivate paper archive
Rows of vintage fruit crate labels laid out on aged paper

A private museum of printed paper

Fruit labels the world threw away

For sixty years these lithographed sheets travelled the glued to wooden crates — orange arches from Valencia, cranes from Taichung, wheat-ringed apples from Kyiv. This archive keeps 1,240 of them, catalogues each one, and lets a few move on to new keepers.

Browse the collection
1 240
Labels catalogued
37
Countries of origin
1908–1979
Printing years covered

Where the paper comes from

The archive is sorted by the packing house that printed the label rather than by fruit. Three regions account for most of it — each with its own printing habits, inks, and superstitions about colour.

  • Stacked Spanish orange crate labels on a dark desk

    Valencia & Sagunto, Spain

    Six- and eight-stone lithographs made for the citrus export trade. Gold borders were struck last, by hand, on the wettest sheets.

    312 labels
  • Stacked Ukrainian orchard paper labels on a dark desk

    Kyiv & Vinnytsia, Ukraine

    State-orchard labels printed in two flat colours, numbered by farm. Survival rates are low, which makes even a creased sheet worth keeping.

    148 labels
  • Stacked Taiwanese pomelo export labels on a dark desk

    Taichung & Tainan, Taiwan

    Letterpress export stickers in jade and gold, with grading marks that only the packing crews could read.

    203 labels
See every country in the archive

Available to collectors

Three sheets leaving the archive

All available labels

Four decades of printing

How a crate label changed its mind

  1. 1940sA 1940s lithographed pear crate label on aged paper

    Stone and patience

    Hand-drawn lithographic stones, muted inks, engraved landscapes. Each colour meant another pass through the press.

  2. 1950sA 1950s lithographed citrus crate label on aged paper

    Sunrise palettes

    Export booms brought brighter reds and gold borders, meant to be read across a busy dockside from ten metres away.

  3. 1960sA 1960s modernist fruit export label on aged paper

    Modernist marks

    Geometry replaced scenery. Wordmarks got tighter, symbols did the talking, and state presses numbered everything.

  4. 1970sA 1970s printed banana fruit sticker on aged paper

    The last paper

    Plastic film arrived and paper labels stopped. Most designs from these years exist only as remainders never glued to a crate.

From the keeper's notebook

Nobody was meant to keep these. They were glue, paper and twelve seconds of a buyer's attention — which is exactly why a surviving sheet tells you more about a decade than a photograph does.

Hands mounting a paper fruit label into an album with tweezers

The reading room is small, but it opens

Two visitors at a time, gloves provided, tea inevitable. Write ahead and tell us which drawer you would like pulled — country, decade, or a single label you have been chasing for years.

Write to the archive

  • Visits by appointment, Tuesday to Saturday, in Lviv — one hour with the drawers of your choice.

  • Can't travel? We scan any catalogued sheet at 1200 dpi and send it to researchers free of charge.

  • Identification requests welcome. Send a photograph and we will tell you what we can about the press and the year.