Citrus crate labels were a serious commercial art form. From the 1910s through the 1960s, growers in California and Spain commissioned vivid lithographed labels to brand their fruit for export, competing for attention in wholesale markets where the box itself was the advertisement. The best examples are small-format masterworks of color and lettering, produced by skilled printers before photographic reproduction made that craft obsolete. The period originals shown here come from that tradition.