Chromolithography

From "Wie das kind sein soll" circa 1890s

Chromolithography was state of the art color printing in the late 1800s.  It made fine art prints available to the middle class.  The inks are still rich and bright a hundred years later.

These unexpectedly vivid illustrations show up in otherwise unremarkable children’s books.  They are a delightful surprise inside dingy covers, the color pictures on better paper interleaved with acid-tanned text pages.

Here are some from a book of nursery rhymes, 1900, about 5×7 inches: