ThePrintedMenagerie

Your home expresses your personality, it relaxes you or it energizes you! My dictionary prints can help you create a sense of vintage whimsy. Fresh, modernistic digital download prints will create a clean look that you can use to decorate around. I love the rush and sense of happiness I get when I redecorate and this can be done so easily by just adding a new piece of art in a room. At The Printed Menagerie you'll find designs to change your mind, or at least your mood!


My name is Sarah Beck and in the offline world I am a potter. I have a busy studio and shop which keeps me hopping during the tourist season here on the island where I live. Because I am pretty much run off my feet during those months (May-November) in the winter, when I'm not working on pottery for the next season, I like to work in other mediums such as drawing and graphic arts. Pottery takes a lot of time and I love the immediacy of the graphic world. Once the design is finished I can print it out right away! That's a fun contrast to the weeks it can sometimes take for clay pieces to be finished.

In the pottery shop I have small used bookstore (clay and books, a great combo eh?!) and often receive old books that are in bad shape. They have bindings that have come apart and pages that are falling out. The paper in these old books has a warm, rich patina of age and is often very smooth. The old style of type setting also makes these pages very attractive. One day I was looking at an old book thinking there must be something I could do with these damaged books! Suddenly I had the idea of printing some images on them. They looked amazing!! The words on the page showed through the printed image giving a depth to the overall image that wasn't there on a blank piece of paper. I was so excited! Of course when I looked online I saw that I wasn't the first to have the idea, but that doesn't bother me, I am happy to be part of a group of people recycling old books.

I have always been drawn to animals and have had many pets of my own. I have raised sheep, rabbits, dogs, pigeons, chickens, guinea pigs, hamsters, turtles, fish, doves, salamanders, budgies, cockatiels and probably some other animals I've forgotten about (oh yup, a hedgehog!). This love of animals and also a love of vintage images led me to name my new shop "The Printed Menagerie". To me it conjures up visions of the Victorian era when menageries were very much in vogue. My personal menagerie has been reduced to one dog and a husband these days but they are pretty good to me so I don't need anything more.

I hope you enjoy browsing my shop as much as I enjoy designing the images you'll find there. I also have two other shops on etsy, www.etsy.com/shop/theartfulbadger and www.etsy.com/shop/wildfirepotter