Letterform Archive has turned a century of vintage hotel luggage labels into 330 gorgeous stickers

Before the heady days of Instagram and TripAdvisor, travellers had another way to show off where they'd been: a battered steamer trunk plastered with the vivid, illustrated labels of grand hotels from around the world. (Or, in our case, tacky fridge magnets – but that's another story entirely.)

These small, adhesive calling cards were designed to be seen and to impress. To signal cosmopolitan adventure and, possibly, your wealth. Now they're being recognised as some of the most spirited graphic designs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Letterform Archive, the San Francisco non-profit dedicated to the history of the graphic arts, has assembled a treasure trove of them. Its latest publication, Hotel Retro: Vintage Luggage Labels from Tokyo to Buenos Aires, gathers hundreds of examples from the Archive's collection and reproduces them, faithfully and in full colour, as 330 removable stickers.

The labels take in an enormous range of styles and destinations. "Each label is a window into the visual culture of its era and destination," the Archive explains. London and Paris, Rio de Janeiro, the Swiss Alps, Bali –the collection moves across continents and decades, charting the visual evolution of commercial design from Art Deco opulence to the geometric precision of Swiss Style.

The historical context is part of what makes the collection so compelling. From the late nineteenth century, industrialisation created a new leisure class with both the means and appetite to travel. Hotels competed hard for guests, and luggage labels became a surprisingly sharp form of brand communication – packed with illustration, hand-lettering, and typographic invention, all designed to catch the eye.

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Letterform Archive Books distributes worldwide through D.A.P. and has what you could call a form of deep-dive design publishing. Previous titles have covered Bauhaus typography, the Vienna Secession, and Japanese commercial art of the 1920s. Hotel Retro fits that tradition – part reference, part keepsake – but with the novelty of being actually usable. The stickers are meant to come out of the book and go somewhere: a notebook, a suitcase, an envelope, a laptop lid.

Which raises the real question: will you only display labels for places you've actually been? Or just go for it and cover everything in sight? That probably depends on how good they look. And from what we've seen, they look very good indeed.