For most of our professional lives we have been immersed in building proprietary information systems using our advanced methodologies and algorithms, which we refer to as Intelligent Information Applications.
We've developed custom projects for some of the largest government agencies and private companies in the world. We host other applications if you have your own image libraries, and we build dynamically linked applications, some of which you will see in our AstroSearch and ArchaeoSearch databases, which are also meta-linked into relevant collections.
A lot of the creativity of the past years has gone into the technology you'll see employed in this AABHR web site, particularly the flexibility you'll see in our Search function. We call it a "smart" image library.
For most browsers and prospective buyers, the best first time approach is to go to the top of the Gallery, and work your way through each category by topic. That will give you a good sense of what's here and how it's organized. When you are familiar with what we have, then you can start using the Search function to search by subject, place, or concept. From there, you'll see that there's also a way to
View By Collection.To find images or objects from our library of 7000+ items (and growing), you can search for simple subjects like "boats", or "flowers", or "horses", or "cowboy", or "Maine". By clicking on the Concept Search, you can also search for items that correlate to ideas like "a selfish mind", or "power struggles" or "nature" or "character of man" or "exquisite beauty" or even "gift of God".
In addition to providing our clients with high quality reproductions of much of this art and select objects in limited edition runs, we can collaborate with you on special projects using different groupings of the vast number of items we have available to us in our gallery. There are already thousands of images in our library, yet we've only scanned a portion of it. In fact, if you don't see something you were looking for, let us know, as we may already have it, but it's just not up yet.
We look forward to talking with you about your special projects. Some of the image collections in our gallery are perfect for home schooling applications. Maybe you have your own art gallery, museum, or club, and would like a special showing put together, or you want to use some of our images as part of a patriotic event, your favorite fundraiser, or a grand opening. Or maybe you are an interior decorator looking for that perfect theme for a new restaurant or livingroom, or a frame or an antique store looking to offer something great to show off your frames, or some period pieces to sell as framable art that's consistent with the vintage goods you specialize in.
The Winding Road ...
So how did AABHR come to be? Somewhere in the last 20 years, my wife and I were walking through a small antique store in the Midwest and happened upon an old book that was full of steel engravings of famous people and places of the past. We were intrigued with the style and amazing art and drawing skills used to illustrate the events described. After we bought a few of these, including a collection about farming, and another focused on the history of the world, we were hooked. And with these purchases, our collection began.One day a close friend of ours showed up with a reproduction of a set of colonial table and cookware. We realized that these reproduction pieces balanced out the need to touch and hold the objects that appeared in so many of our engravings and woodblocks, and that modern reproduction artists were working off these images in old books to make modern copies. So we began collecting some choice reproduction pieces too, where the workmanship was equal to or better than the originals.
Later on we went crazy collecting Victorian tradecards, postcards, and early 20th century humor magazines, and we were amazed when we found a couple of Dr. Seuss's early cartoons lost in the pages of Judge, an early New York society magazine. This complemented our Buffalo Bill Wild West Show and Cowboy Era memorabilia nicely.
After awhile our collection took on a life of its own and became a bit eclectic, going from American neolithic stone art and artifacts to a large collection of Middle Eastern seals and beads going back to Sumeria. Along the way we picked up some Scottish dirks done in Damascus steel, some Revolutionary War powder horns, some homespun American primitives, some Teddy Roosevelt era original political cartoons, and a wonderful collection of 19th Century Masonic jewelry and accoutrements.
Oh, did I mention the collection of Tibetan paintings and choice Japanese woodblocks? As you can see, we've had a lot of fun with all this. (We're still looking for our own mummy and a real tobacco store Indian ... )
So is there a theme to all this? Well yes. After all these years we think so. It is a celebration of the wonders and beauty of our Western Civilization, its roots in the Classical World, and the rise of the Middle Class which is best illustrated in the Art of the many engravings, etchings, and tradecards in our collections -- along with a few things which just happened to have found their way onto our continent from far away places.
We're not really trying to sell antiques here. We want you to enjoy our gallery. With OCR scanning technology and high quality printers, we've discovered that a lot of our art and ephemera can be reproduced. We hope to reproduce some of our ancient seals in electrum (half silver half gold) in limited edition runs, as well as our Buffalo Bill era watch fobs and medallions. Some of the Victorian tradecards make beautiful framed art.
So, here we are, AABHR. We've got Art and Antiquities, Books, and Historical Reproductions. We love all our stuff and don't really want to part with it. If there's something you like, we can probably make you a copy or make you a limited run if you want to resell some of it, do an art show, or educate a class. Use your imagination and let's have some fun.
