Here's a fun bit of science history for you: Back before we could just download PDFs, if you wanted a paper and it wasn't in a journal in your library, you wrote to the author for a copy. So universities made these nice little post cards for requesting article reprints.
It does seem like a missed opportunity not to include some institution-themed art on the cards. I can imagine 1990's era scientists proudly displaying their collection of colorful reprint requests.
Printing wasn't so easy or cheap in the dinosaur era. 🦕
Some ILL departments do have custom thank yous, a related kind of art! Once got a very memorable corn mascot card 🌽
i found a pile of them once when i was cleaning an old lab closet that clearly hadn't been organized for a few PIs' tenures. they had separated out the ones with cool stamps and postmarks into a different pile than the plain ones!
A great way to build a stamp collection before the turn of the century
I actually had a (very old) scientist write me a letter asking for a print in the early '00s. The journal I published in still sent paper copies then too, so I mailed him one back. The one and only time that happened!
And department secretaries spent loads of time putting reprints into manila envelopes, addressing them, and getting them out to you in a timely fashion.
I really think we need (physical) thank you or congrats notes to send all the researchers - specifically for folks early in their research careers (for example grad students). We have been talking about a way to do this (communications) activity in a course. But haven't fully figured it out yet.