Century Library is a brand brought to you by the founders of Inspiration Hut and Tom Chalky, aka husband and wife team Tom and Abbie White.
For over a decade, we have been blogging about design, sharing inspiration, educating, and supplying as many resources as we can to creators all over. Throughout most of that time, we have been collecting fancy antique books and ephemera for no real reason besides thinking they were cool. Slowly but surely, they found their way into the digital products we offer on Tom Chalky in the form of illustration packs, restored typefaces, and texture collections.
And while we still continue to offer and create more of these products, we wanted a way to catalog every illustration we’ve edited (isolated PNG images, repeated patterns, textures, etc.) alongside the raw and unedited sources we’ve hoarded over the years. Thus, Century Library was born.
What is Century Library?
Put simply, a vintage stock image website, but library sounded better, so we went with that. It’s where you’ll find a wide variety of perfectly captured antique images from natural history, to architecture, from transport to landscape, from early graphic design to typography, and so much more.
What do we offer you?
I’m sure you don’t want to hear me ramble on about our expertise or how we’ve perfected the art of capturing and preserving the quality of these wonderful pieces of history. You just want to find out how to access our library and what’s the catch. So I’ll skip to the best part.
What do we offer that is free?
All of our unedited raw scans are available to download for free (Oh, and commercial use is a-okay). The free versions are smaller than the originals that premium users have access to but large enough to work with, especially if you don’t require full resolution 300dpi quality. Find out how to get started here.
What do we offer that is premium?
The original, full-resolution scan of each and every image we have in our collection. On top of that, all of the edited png illustrations that we have painstakingly isolated from their original backgrounds. The best part is that you can download up to 999 of these images each and every month you stay subscribed. You can become a member here.
This is just the beginning!
Each of our paid members helps fund the purchases of more vintage sources, further fueling the variety and usefulness of our library, which is growing by the day (both physically and virtually!).
Our dream extends into publishing image books covering various themes (perfect for reference, tracing, physical artwork, etc.), restoring particular pieces to be sold as exclusive prints, and so much more!