Color Plates: The Original Infographics

My visit to the thrift store last week was not only an opportunity to play hooky, but it yielded a few awesome thrift scores, including a near-complete set of 1923 reference books. Each volume in the Home and School Reference Work: A Library of Practical, Authoritative Information Drawn from Every Department of Human Knowledge (!) features four to six color plates, which at some point I will probably remove from the books and frame. Here are most of them, for inspiration. The cashier at the store asked me why I was buying all of the books. When I told her there were "lots of color plates inside", she looked at me confused and said, "Color plates?" I tried to explain, but I think she still thinks there was ceramic dinnerware hiding somewhere between the covers.