Once the largest menu printing company in the country, The Lord Menu Company operated from 1909 through the 1970s in downtown Los Angeles, where its warehouse full of letterpresses and linotype machines supplied restaurants as a “daily menu press” throughout the city with over 500 menus a day (as well as to restaurants in San Diego, Phoenix, Lake Tahoe, and Las Vegas). It was Lord that first put full color photographs into the visual menu lexicon, an art they mastered with their menus for the Bob’s Big Boy chain, which next to their hat designs for the Brown Derby menus and regal portraiture of Romanoff’s, were probably their most famous. The Los Angeles Public Library recently received a donation of rare menus and printing materials from Paul Abram, son of Lord’s longtime lithographer and manufacturing manager Albert Abram. We are thrilled to include them, and their stories, in the forthcoming book and exhibition.
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