Direct from Miriam Loo
Surviving trade documents, payment records and receipts support Leo’s direct acquisition from Miriam Loo of LooArt Press.
200,000+ vintage prints, posters, lithographs, and more
Direct from the source.
The paper trail survives.
The Eremita Family Archive
Preserving the history. Continuing the story.
Poster Reserve brings together the collecting legacy of Leo W. Levinski and the Eremita family’s commitment to preserving it. With more than 25 years in the liquidation business, Stephen Eremita knew Leo as both a fellow liquidator and a friend. Shortly before Leo’s passing, Stephen purchased his entire Seattle estate, keeping its vast collection of vintage posters, prints, lithographs, original artwork and business records together.
Leo served in the Washington Army National Guard, rising to Staff Sergeant and receiving an honorable discharge. He later built Univalco International Distributors in Seattle, with surviving letterhead marking its establishment in 1956. Over decades, his relationships with artists, publishers and dealers helped shape an extraordinary collection.
The archive includes direct acquisitions from Miriam Loo of LooArt Press and AA Sales owner Ron Russell as their businesses closed, correspondence with Goes Lithographing of Chicago, and material from Aaron Brothers. Original purchase orders, payment records, letters, crates and labels remain alongside the artwork, preserving its history.
The collection spans religious and Catholic imagery, children, portraits, birds, wildlife, flowers, landscapes and coastal scenes, alongside travel, historic monuments, cities, skiing, aviation, concert and movie posters, and psychedelic art. Original paintings, velvet paintings, pencil drawings and works created for Leo sit alongside pieces by August Holland and many other artists.
Today, owned and operated by the Eremita family in Seattle, Washington, USA, Poster Reserve holds more than 200,000 vintage prints and works on paper, including material dating back to the early 1900s. Through careful research, photography and cataloging, the family is bringing this collection back into view, one piece at a time.
Thank you for taking the time to explore our story and the collection we’re proud to share.
The Eremita Family
Primary-source records
The paper trail is still here.
The collection’s history is preserved in physical records: publisher correspondence, payment documentation and a signed 1972 purchase order. These records remain together with the prints, their original boxes and their dealer history.
Direct from Ron Russell
Original letters and acquisition records preserve the history of Leo’s direct purchases from AA Sales owner Ronald “Ron” Russell.
Goes Lithographing letter
Surviving Goes Lithographing correspondence is addressed to Leo Levinski at Univalco, 512 First Avenue North, Seattle.
Signed Univalco purchase order
A surviving purchase order bears Leo’s signature and the Univalco Seattle identity, preserving an original record of the dealer’s activity.
LooArt Press · Colorado Springs, Colorado
Acquired directly from Miriam Loo.
The collection provenance identifies a major LooArt acquisition made by Leo directly from Miriam Loo as LooArt's business was closing. The material included original-period posters and prints that had not gone through ordinary retail circulation and remained together in Leo's holdings for decades.
The LooArt group reaches across travel, skiing, maps, photography, illustration and late-1960s graphic culture. Many pieces retain their original LooArt production numbers, including familiar archive titles such as Vail, Paris, Yellowstone, Earth Rise, Nassau, Zion, India and the Lucia Capacchione Pearce series.
What makes the group unusual is not only the individual artwork. It is the survival of quantity, boxes, labels and provenance as a group. Some titles remain in multiple copies inside long-held flat boxes rather than as isolated examples separated from their original dealer history.
AA Sales · Seattle, Washington · 1970s
Blacklight, serigraphs and the art behind the posters.
AA Sales Inc. was a Seattle distributor associated with the late-1960s and 1970s poster market, including blacklight graphics, silkscreen and serigraph work, flocked-velvet pieces and counterculture imagery. The archive provenance ties Leo directly to AA Sales owner Ronald “Ron” Russell.
When AA Sales closed, Leo acquired remaining inventory directly from Russell. The acquisition extended beyond finished posters: the archive also preserves original pencil and ink production artwork connected to AA Sales designs. Keeping those originals together with finished posters, dealer material and related documentation gives the group a much stronger historical context than a loose collection of vintage prints.
Surviving examples range from Seattle imagery and blacklight posters to pieces such as the 1971 Klondike Discovery serigraph. Many were stored flat and never displayed, while the original drawings document the creative side of the business that usually disappeared once commercial production ended.
Chain of custody
From the source to Poster Reserve.
Two of the archive's most important poster groups follow parallel paths into the same Seattle collection.
LooArt Press→Miriam Loo→Leo / Univalco→Leo's estate→Poster Reserve
AA Sales→Ronald Russell→Leo / Univalco→Leo's estate→Poster Reserve
The Eremita family acquired the collection shortly before Leo's passing and has kept the archive, its physical storage history and its provenance material together while cataloging it for public sale. Historical details on this page are drawn from surviving archive documents, crate markings, labels, associated material and first-hand provenance passed with the collection; where a point is based on collection provenance rather than independent published research, Poster Reserve treats it as such.
Leo W. Levinski
The collector behind the archive.
Leo W. Levinski built Univalco International Distributors in Seattle; surviving letterhead marks the business “EST. 1956.” His direct relationships with print publishers and dealers brought together the posters, lithographs, serigraphs and production artwork now being cataloged by Poster Reserve.
He kept the artwork together with original wooden crates, flat boxes, inventory labels and trade correspondence. That preservation gives collectors context that often disappears when individual prints are separated from a dealer’s holdings.
Before his art business, Leo served in the Washington Army National Guard, rising to Staff Sergeant and receiving an honorable discharge.
Today, Poster Reserve is keeping the collection and its surviving records together while documenting individual works for sale.
What survived
Not just posters. An archive ecosystem.
The collection today includes original wooden crates, flat poster boxes, folders, rolled pieces, dealer catalogs, correspondence, signed works, production art, original paintings and drawings, velvet paintings, serigraphs, lithographs, maps, regional art and large quantities of vintage prints.
Some boxes hold a single rare work. Others hold multiples that appear to have remained together since the dealer era. That physical context matters: it helps explain how large groups of original-period material could survive for decades with little or no display history.
Explore the archive ↗Poster Reserve today
One piece at a time, the boxes are opening again.
Poster Reserve is cataloging, photographing and documenting a physical archive far larger than the portion currently online. The goal is not to erase the storage history and make everything look newly manufactured. It is to preserve the evidence, identify the people and companies behind the work, describe condition accurately, and return original-period material to view with as much of its story intact as possible.