Killer Whale in Tenants Harbor, ME; LB2010.9.117573; One of the “new” negatives recently adopted.
The Eastern Illustrating & Publishing Co. was a “real photo” postcard publisher based in Belfast, Maine. (“Real photo” postcards are printed through a photographic printing process, not the offset process more commonly used. It produces an image with better resolution than offset.) Covering nearly every town and village in Maine, the rest of New England, and upstate New York, the collection serves as a photographic survey of the Northeast in the first half of the 20th century.
The Penobscot Marine Museum’s Adopt-a-Town program began in 2010 to raise money to acquire 7,500 Eastern Illustrating & Publishing Co. negatives. It gave people a way to directly support the project by funding negatives from towns that held meaning for them. The response was overwhelming, and we were able to raise what was needed to acquire the initial lot of negatives, as well as process many of them. We have continued to uncover more negatives, and with each “new” batch, we have added them to the Adopt-a-Town list.
The Eastern Illustrating & Publishing Co. collection now stands at more than 55,000 negatives! Our work isn’t finished; there are ongoing costs to digitize, store, and catalog them. Plenty of negatives are still waiting for support.