In late 2025, I started a large digital restoration project focused on period furniture and design ephemera, including catalogs, brochures, price lists, advertisements, and trade publications. These pieces were never meant to survive forever. Most were working documents, handled by salespeople, dealers, decorators, or customers, then folded into drawers, marked up, mailed around, or thrown away when the next line came out.
The project started because generative AI image models had reached a point where high-quality image reproduction was possible. I had originally wanted to redo the Heywood-Wakefield collectors books and organize the material in a more logical way. Along the way, I discovered several public archives where old catalogs were freely available, which expanded the project well beyond Heywood-Wakefield. AI has been useful for image repair and reproduction, but the real restoration work still takes time. The layout, cleanup, and text work are done in Adobe Photoshop and InDesign.
Catalogs often tell us things the objects alone cannot: the original name of a line, the available finishes, the way a company described its own designs, the rooms or lifestyles it was selling into, and how pieces were meant to work together. For furniture and dinnerware especially, catalogs can be the missing link between an individual object and the larger design and manufacturing story around it.
Surviving materials, though, are often rough. Pages may be yellowed, stained, torn, faded, crooked, or marked with dealer notations. Some were printed on inexpensive paper that darkened over time. Others have rusted staples, water damage, missing corners, or uneven scans. Digital restoration makes these documents easier to read and share while still preserving the character of the original. In many catalogs, I have also colorized images in period-appropriate colors, which helps bring the original designs back into clearer view.
This work matters because so much American design history survives only in fragments. Many midcentury and earlier manufacturers did not leave behind complete archives. Companies closed, records were lost, and many product lines were documented only in trade catalogs, price lists, or magazine ads. A single catalog can confirm dates, show alternate configurations, identify rare forms, or reveal how a company positioned itself in the market. Restoring and sharing these materials makes them more useful for collectors, researchers, restorers, and anyone trying to understand how these objects fit into the broader history of American design.
It is also not just about the objects. These materials are part of graphic design history as well: the layouts, typography, colors, photography, and selling language all reflect the period in which they were made.
Restoring a catalog also changes how I look at the objects themselves. The process forces you to slow down. You notice the room settings, the pricing structure, the way certain pieces are repeated across pages, and the small details that might be missed in a quick scan. Sometimes a catalog answers a question. Sometimes it raises new ones. Either way, it becomes part of the research process rather than just an illustration.
Digital restoration is both preservation and access. It takes something fragile and often privately held and makes it easier to study without repeatedly handling the original. It also gives these materials a second life online, where they can be connected to surviving objects, company histories, restoration projects, and design references.
For me, collecting is not just about owning the object. It is about rebuilding the context around it. The catalog, the advertisement, the finish chart, the dealer sheet, and the factory photo all help tell the story. Digital restoration is one way to keep that story visible.
