CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/17/2026

A sticker book of vintage luggage labels from the golden age of travel

This week, Letterform Archive releases a book like no other on our list. A sticker book collecting 330 vintage luggage labels from the golden age of travel, spanning from 1920 to 1970, today, “these small relics of early twentieth-century wanderlust” recall steamer trunks and intercontinental voyages by ocean liner and sleeper train. “The luggage label collection at Letterform Archive in San Francisco numbers in the thousands,” the editors write. “Many of its specimens came from a local source: San Francisco’s own historic Huntington Hotel, a luxury accommodation first opened in 1922, where a binder of treasured labels was assembled by a concierge whose name has also slipped from record. Acquired by the Archive as examples of appealing type and lettering from across the globe, these pieces of print ephemera attest to advertising’s early heyday, when stunning illustration, inventive letterforms and novel color printing made every surface—no matter how small—a vehicle for transport to a far-off land, if only in the imagination.”