Stock photography companies keep coming and going, taking their sample images with them. Most famously was Retro Americana, who moved its web address more often than I change my pants, until it eventually disappeared altogether. If you manage to track down Retro Americana, they can sell you high resolution black and white vintage images which isn't a service that Tack-O-Rama can provide, but what I can do is offer you downloads of sample photos from several of the now defunct stock photography companies. At 72 dpi and between 300 and 400 pixels in size, the images are not suitable for printing, but they're excellent as web illustrations and for making collages such as the ones found on this very site!

From the page 7 Ways to Charm a Man - pickled heads!

This image from the Contact page responded well to colorizing.

Altogether there are 439 images that have been zipped into 4 files for easier downloading. The links found below will take you to the preview pages where you can click to go off-site and download the zip files. 

Page 1 (112 images at 2.4MB)

Page 2 (112 images at 1.9MB)

Page 3 (111 images at 2.4MB)

Page 4 (103 images at 1.6MB)