0
Your Cart
0
Your Cart

Press & Editorial

Press & editorial

The Menu Press is an independent project that curates, digitally restores, and reformats public-domain historic menus from the Buttolph Collection at The New York Public Library. Our archive covers 1880–1928 — Atlantic ocean liners, Gilded-Age hotels, royal yachts, Belle Époque cafés, military and naval banquets, World’s Fair dining halls, and the first wave of Art Deco menu illustration.

This page is for journalists, editors, and researchers. If you need imagery, background, or a curator quote on menu design history, ocean-liner dining, the Buttolph archive, or the practical craft of restoring printed ephemera, email hello@themenupress.com and we will respond within one business day.

Story angles we can support

  • What first-class passengers actually ate at sea, 1880–1928. First-hand menu cards from Cunard, White Star, Hamburg-Amerika, Norddeutscher Lloyd, Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, Red Star, and Holland America — not summaries.
  • The Art Deco moment in commercial print, 1925–1930. The 1927 R.M.S. Olympic cover and the 1928 CGT Carte des Vins illustrated by Sylvain Sauvage are canonical examples; the archive holds dozens more.
  • The Buttolph Collection as a historical object. Frank E. Buttolph, the New York librarian who, beginning in 1899, asked restaurants and shipping lines around the world to mail her their menus, and the 25,000-piece archive she had assembled by the time she stopped collecting in 1924.
  • The death of the printed menu, 1930–2026. Why printed cards were standard hospitality and why their disappearance changed the dining room.
  • How modern bars and restaurants use historic menus on the wall. Real archival material versus designer reproductions; what changes when a real 1900 card is framed in a 2026 cocktail bar.
  • Belle Époque, Edwardian, and Gilded-Age hotel banquets. Waldorf-Astoria, Hotel Astor, Delmonico’s, the Murray Hill, and other Manhattan rooms.
  • Public-domain image curation as a small-scale archival practice. What it means to release public-domain material in a curated, restored, machine-readable form.

High-resolution imagery

The original artworks held by The New York Public Library are in the public domain in the United States. Journalists may use any image from the archive at editorial resolution without further permission. For print or 300-DPI reproductions, email hello@themenupress.com and we will send the files directly. Credit appreciated: Buttolph Collection of Menus, The New York Public Library / curatorial restoration by The Menu Press.

Founder

Vincent is the founder of The Menu Press. He works specifically with the late-Victorian, Edwardian, Belle Époque, and Art Deco material — the ocean-liner and hotel-banquet menus from roughly 1880 to 1930 — and produces archival-quality print files for designers, bar and restaurant operators, and private collectors. The Menu Press also publishes long-form editorial work on menu design history, ocean-liner dining, the Buttolph archive itself, and the practical craft of printing and framing vintage menu art.

Quick facts

  • Source archive: Buttolph Collection of Menus, The New York Public Library (roughly 25,000 menus, gathered 1899–1924).
  • Coverage: 1880–1928, with the densest material in the 1890s–1900s.
  • Lines represented: Cunard, White Star, Hamburg-Amerika, Norddeutscher Lloyd, Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, Red Star, Holland America, Pacific Mail, Nippon Yusen Kaisha, Toyo Kisen Kaisha, Imperial Japanese Steamship, Canadian Pacific Railway, Santa Fe Route, and others.
  • Hotel material: Waldorf-Astoria, Hotel Astor, Plaza, Knickerbocker, Murray Hill, Delmonico’s, Hotel Metropole, Savoy Hotel (London), Carlton Hotel (London), Imperial Hotel (Tokyo), and dozens of other Belle Époque grand hotels.
  • Restoration: 300 DPI archival reformatting; minimal museum-style correction; no AI generation; no designer reinterpretation of original artwork.
  • Licence: Original artworks are in the public domain in the United States. Editorial selection, restoration, metadata, and site content are © The Menu Press.

Contact

Email: hello@themenupress.com
Response time: within 1 business day.
Site: themenupress.com.