Shorpy calls itself “The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog”, and acts as a catalogue of vintage snapshots and photos of little official (at least in a broad, historical sense) importance. In a time before the Internet, these sort of photos were confined to mysterious, musky antique shops, thrown in old shoeboxes with yellowed postcards from long since demolished tourist traps, and baseball cards with the smiling faces of now-unknown players adorning them. Nowadays, these ancient images are being digitally frozen, the originals left to perish at the unforgiving hands of time.

So much overlooked history is being catalogued in searchable databases, in the Web 2.0 world of Youtube, Wikipedia, and Flickr– not just in the realm of antique photos, but in all forms of ephemera. Images and sounds are resurrected (Shorpy says it “brings our ancestors back, at least to the desktop”) after so many years imprisoned in desk drawers, bootleg VHS tapes, and moldy out-of-print books. Now we need not leave the comfort of our homes to seek out unique objects in foreign places. The function of said antique stores, each with their own character and atmosphere, as keeper of such artifacts, will disappear at the same rate as the already-declining record stores and video stores, as all media loses its physical nature, soon to be accessible only within in the sterile virtual space of every monitor hooked up to the Internet.

Is that too much to sacrifice for glimpse of the abandoned past? Decide for yourself, by checking out the beautiful images in Shorpy’s already vast collection. Click the jump to see some of my favorites.