The Buttolph collection of menus - NYPL Digital Collections
The New York Public Library has been collecting restaurant menus since the 1890s, and the crowdsourced project has over 17,500 of them so far dating from 1843 to 2008. The archive was started with one woman, Frank E. Buttolph, who spent 25 years writing to restaurants, marching into dining rooms, and placing ads in trade publications to build the collection from scratch