The Pleasures of Vintage Educational Charts

Not quite posters, not quite prints, these displays make for an unusual home décor niche.

Like most people, I have assorted posters, prints, and artworks displayed on the walls of my home. But the piece shown above, which hangs in my dining room, doesn’t quite fit into any of those categories. It’s an educational chart, produced in Germany sometime around the 1950s, showing various species of small European forest mammals. Made of linen-backed paper, it measures 39 inches wide by 28 inches high (not including the top and bottom poles) and was presumably used in a German classroom decades ago.

Isn’t it awesome? The composition, the deep earth tones, the animals’ faces, all the curled tails — I find it beautiful and amusing in equal measure.

It turns out that there are lots of vintage educational charts like this one floating around the collectibles market. Many are science- or nature-related (the anatomy of a starfish, various berry cultivars, a look at our solar system, the symptoms of rickets, etc.), but there are also some devoted to things like civics (an assortment of traffic signs), industrial processes (how rubber is manufactured), and grade school basics (standard penmanship). For reasons that aren’t clear to me, most of these items are from Europe; maybe a big warehouse cache of them was recently discovered, or maybe all the American ones were snapped up years ago.

Over the past two years, I’ve become mildly obsessed with these vintage educational displays and have a amassed a small collection of them. Here’s one showing the dynamics of a solar and lunar eclipse (it’s in rougher condition than the small mammals, but still beautiful):