It's hard to say whether Charles S. Anderson’s interest in American kitsch, printed pop culture, and classic art and illustration is devotional or obsessional. In addition to his lifetime collection of millions of pieces of printed ephemera and plastic objects, Anderson and his team at Charles S. Anderson Design Company (CSA) in Minneapolis have spent the last 20 years illustrating, editing, refining, collaging, combining, and assembling more than 50,000 images, creating countless original illustrations and photographs from staff members of CSA and outside artists, and purchasing the rights to thousands of pieces of original art to create CSA Images, an almost limitless resource for designers hungry for stock art. Now, CSA is looking for ways to bring these images to a much broader audience of consumers who can be converted to their charms: “We’re trying to populate the world with cool things,” Anderson says. “The difficult part is how to do it and keep doing it well, and make money while you’re at it.”

Pop Ink is his latest answer to this decades-long desire. According to the introduction to the catalog, “Pop Ink is a cohesive retail program backed by extensive art and design from one of the world’s leading graphic design firms. … Our goal is to infuse common and uncommon objects with a unique, contemporary pop art sensibility.”

Flip through the pages of the catalog and you’ll find a variety of everyday objects from purses and wallets to lamps, postcards, and plates, brought to life with images derived from the many diverse aspects of popular culture and leavened with healthy doses of self-referential humor. “The Blue Plate Special” is a plate with a diner menu reproduced on it in blue ink. A T-shirt printed with a mounted deer head is captioned with the words “Nice Rack.” And on and on potential Pop Ink products go, for more than 70 pages. “This is a natural extension of what we have been doing and are doing,” says Erik Johnson, art director and designer at CSA. “We’ve done lots of package and product design for clients and realized what great potential our image collection has for product use.”