The Verso Project: Baby Dear’s Great Escape

This limited edition T-shirt is part of the first capsule collection of The Verso Project, an archival storytelling initiative from The New York Times Store that highlights rarely seen images from The Times’s archives. The shirt front features a highly detailed reproduction of a raw, unedited Times photo. The back of the shirt shows the reverse side of the print, also known as the verso, mirroring the physical photograph and telling the story of its usage through hasty annotations and glued on newspaper clippings.

From image selection to T-shirt color (transfer paper blue, a reference to the reproduction techniques of yore), every element in this capsule collection is highly considered. They are hand-printed by Philadelphia Printworks, a Black-owned, socially conscious heritage brand and screen-printing workshop inspired by past and present social equity movements. Shirts from The Verso Project are limited edition and single run. Once they sell out, they will not be produced or made available for sale again.

It was Independence Day of 1952 when Baby Dear, the rare South African talking bird and pet of Mrs. Edna Bradley, “decided to declare its own independence,” escaping through the window of their eighth-floor apartment. What happened next could be a scene straight out of “I Love Lucy”: Baby Dear flew into a neighbor’s residence through her open window. Naturally, the concerned neighbor first went downstairs to the deli for birdseed, after which she proceeded to canvass the neighborhood for the bird’s owner, along with her trusty sidekick George (doorman). Later the two were able to determine who owned the pet and the bird and his mistress were happily reunited as Baby Dear excitedly chirped “Hello, Edna.”