Volk

In the 1950s, Harry Volk Jr. founded The Harry Volk Jr. Art Studio in Pleasantville, New Jersey, offering inexpensive booklets of copyright-free, thematic clip art that became ubiquitous in advertising and publishing. These booklets served as a shortcut for those lacking artistic skills, reflecting and shaping the cultural zeitgeist through illustrations of emerging societal topics. Volk’s clip art evolved to mirror changing social attitudes, especially in terms of gender and race, over decades.

While clip art’s origins trace back to 19th-century design compendiums, its mass production and wide distribution, especially through Dover Books and later desktop publishing, revolutionised the accessibility of visual content.

Though clip art is now largely obsolete, it laid the groundwork for modern visual communication tools, influencing the meme culture and GIF libraries. Its legacy endures in how simple, iconic images continue to represent complex ideas, democratising graphic creation and perpetuating archetypes that remain central to visual culture today.

Presented in this zine are some cool examples of the Volk catalogue.

A5 B&W 20 pages.