By Ellen London

It’s the ultimate tourist souvenir: the printed cotton T-shirt. As wearable proof of a trip well spent, these travelers’ tokens are collected by the dozen. The problem is they all start to look the same.

Or do they?

Liberty Graphics (www.libertygraphicstshirts.com), of Liberty, was founded in 1977 by a group of Waldo County artists in honor of the town’s sesquicentennial. Founder Tom Opper was disappointed by the lack of celebratory T-shirts. “We needed the T-shirts, and we needed them fast!” he says. So he bought a press and began taking orders on the spot. Opper and his colleagues used water-based ink to print their designs, allowing them to fill and customize orders quickly. Business boomed. Now, three decades later, Liberty Graphics distributes tees to more than one hundred clients and customers worldwide from their retail store in the heart of historic Liberty. The eco-friendly tees tout no cliché scenes of schooners or lighthouses — rather they sport beautiful artwork by some of Maine’s most notable artists and illustrators.