Six collections

L'Heure Verte · 1896–1910s

The Green Hour

Absinthe — the hero collection. Every mark here is dead.

Privat-Livemont's Absinthe Robette leads: the most beautiful poster the green fairy ever got. Switzerland banned absinthe in 1910, France in 1915, the U.S. in 1912 — within twenty years the bans erased the category and every mark that sold it. What survives, survives only as art.

7 pieces hanging

Pre-Prohibition Americana · 1870s–1919

The Lost Breweries

Brewery lithographs and calendar art — thousands of brands, extinguished in one year.

Prohibition (1920) shuttered thousands of American breweries in a single stroke; most never reopened after Repeal. This collection is deep Americana, dead marks throughout.

8 pieces hanging

Rye & Bourbon, Pre-1920 · 1880s–1919

Whiskey Before the Drought

Pre-Prohibition American whiskey and rye lithography.

Dead American marks are weighted here; live Scotch houses are flagged or shelved rather than sold as if they were still pouring. The buyer's wall is the home bar and the den.

6 pieces hanging

La Maison, in Poster · 1896–1899

The Champagne Wall

Mucha's Moët & Chandon and Ruinart — live marks, flagged throughout.

Alphonse Mucha's champagne panels for two houses that never stopped pouring. Sold strictly as art history — the poster, not the pour. Every piece here is flagged live-mark; nothing on this wall is marketing.

6 pieces hanging

Bitters · Vermouth · Quinquina · 1900s–1920s

The Aperitivo

Cappiello's Maurin Quina leads; Campari and Cinzano hang flagged live.

Leonetto Cappiello's green devil — the poster that made him, and arguably the birth of the mascot era in advertising: sell the symbol, not the scene.

2 pieces hanging

Temperance & Enforcement · 1873–1933

The Dry Years

The counter-collection — the Green Hour's mirror image.

WCTU and Anti-Saloon League material, and enforcement-era government work (basis PD-USGov where applicable) — the case FOR the bans that built every other room in this house. Repeal iconography (1933) is on the watch list: it unlocks January 2029 under the same 95-year wall as everything else here, and cannot publish early.

8 pieces hanging

Empire & Export · 1892–1929

Trade Winds

The bar the empire built — beer, rum, sake, and colonial wine advertising from Tokyo to Brisbane to Algiers.

Where the Belle Époque wall stops at the Atlantic, the same commercial-art wave carried further on colonial and export trade: Japanese beer houses selling to a modernizing empire, Australian colonial breweries and distillers, French Algeria's settler wine trade. Most of these marks never stopped pouring — Kirin, Asahi, and Australia's XXXX and Tooheys are still on shelves today. Sold strictly as art history, flagged live throughout, the same rule as the Champagne Wall.

7 pieces hanging