Ever since she was 12 and would bike to the local library sale—rescuing books from the 1800s to put on her shelves—Corinna Buchholz has loved all kinds of vintage paper and the story it tells. Years later, with 25 years’ graphic design experience and a Master’s Degree in history, Corinna runs Piddix, one of the most popular independent archives for licensing vintage images in the world.
With a full-sized scanner in her backpack and a camera in hand, Corinna regularly travels to the dust-laden archives, back-alley antique stores, and soaring libraries of the world with her family, returning home with suitcases full of one-of-a-kind ephemera. She has personally visited or scanned images from 154 archives around the world (and counting).
Back home, Corinna incorporates the amazing ephemera into new, trend-forward artwork that has been featured on television and in numerous publications including NBC New York, HGTV, PBS, USA Today, Where Women Create, and Photoshop Wow and has been licensed on over 10,000 products.
About the Piddix Archives
Named after her hometown of Portland, Oregon, Corinna founded Piddix Archives (P-D-X) in 2006 after buying a box of vintage photographs at an estate sale. Hating to cut them up for her artwork, she instead researched their copyright and scanned the images, then started selling the files to other designers. Within a year Corinna became one of the top ten sellers on etsy (out of over a million shops), then quickly branched out to licensing for larger companies such as Target and Anthropologie.
Each piddix illustration is carefully scanned or photographed in highest resolution, professionally restored, and thoroughly researched for copyright with the help of a team of lawyers to ensure it’s 100% safe for commercial use.
Over 100,000 images later, it is Corinna’s attention to quality and her ability to track down almost any image a company may desire that make her a favorite source for fun, sophisticated imagery that translates to all types of products.
Piddix images are licensed on more than 10,000 products.
Select clients include:
Fun Facts @ the Piddix Collection
• Most images take between three and seven hours to fully restore.
• The piddix Alice in Wonderland collection was scanned from one of the only books Sir John Tenniel hand-colored himself.
• The most expensive images Corinna has photographed/scanned so far are from Audubon’s Birds of America . Original sets sell at auction for $8-$12 million.
• Much of the piddix tattoo collection was scanned from the original tattoo flash that hung on the walls of Sailor Jerry’s Hawaiian tattoo shop in the 1960s.
• While visiting an archive 1800 miles away, Corinna was nearly crushed between 4,000-pound-moving shelves when the sliding track malfunctioned.
• One of the oldest piddix collections is a series of flower engravings from the 1700s that Corinna scanned from a mid-western seed archive.
