About The Menu Press
The Menu Press is a small, independent project. We curate, digitally restore, and reformat historic menus for people who want to put a real piece of dining history on their walls — bar owners, restaurateurs, collectors, designers, and anyone who finds the printed table of a 1900 ocean liner more interesting than a generic reproduction.
Where the menus come from
Every menu we sell is drawn from the Buttolph Collection of Menus at The New York Public Library. The collection was built by Frank E. Buttolph, a New York librarian who, beginning around 1900, asked restaurants, ships, hotels, and clubs around the world to send her copies of their printed menus. By the time she stopped collecting in 1924, she had gathered roughly 25,000 menus. The Library has digitised the entire collection at high resolution and released the originals into the public domain in the United States.
These are not reproductions or designer interpretations. They are scans of the actual printed cards that passengers, guests, and diners held in their hands — the watercolour cover of a Norddeutscher Lloyd menu from 1901, the embossed Cunard heraldic crest of 1882, the Art Deco illustration on an R.M.S. Olympic menu from 1927.
What we do to them
We do not change the artwork. The Library’s high-resolution scans are the source. Our work is the curatorial and technical layer on top:
- Selection. Out of roughly 17,000 candidate menus, we evaluated each by visual quality, historical interest, condition, and print suitability. The fifty-two cards in this launch survived that filter.
- Restoration. Where a scan has paper damage, fading, or extraneous library marks adjacent to the design, we make minimal, archival-style corrections — the same conservation logic used by museums for image plates.
- Reformatting. Each menu is rendered at 300 DPI in three print sizes (8×10, 11×14, 16×20 inches), in two versions: a pure print with no added text, and a museum print with a small caption (ship/venue, year, source).
- Context. Each download includes a short PDF documenting the menu’s ship or venue, the date, the occasion, and the visual style.
What this is not
We do not sell designer-drawn “vintage-look” menus. We do not invent fictional ships or restaurants. We do not print and ship physical products — every order is delivered as an instant digital download you print yourself, or take to a local framing shop.
Copyright and credit
The original artworks are in the public domain in the United States and most other jurisdictions. The Menu Press claims copyright in the curatorial selection, the digital restoration, the museum-label formatting, the historical metadata, and the original site content. See our Copyright Notice for full details.