George Shane worked as as artist for the Register for many years, painting popular pictures of town squares, courthouses, local landmarks, and century farms for the supplement to the Sunday Register. Often, he wrote brief histories to accompany the painting. This collection contains a series of some 85 of these color reproductions from the Sunday Register. The original paintings were so popular that every painting but one was sold to private collectors, including one to Norman Lear, who bought the one of downtown Greenfield, where he was filming the movie Cold Turkey (1971) . Shane also did paintings for himself and for sale, and had work in many art shows, including a one-man show in the Des Moines Art Center in 1951. Catalogs for many of these shows are part of this collection, as are records of sales. Shane was active in the Des Moines art community, including the Des Moines Art Center and several of exhibit catalogs and bulletins from the Des Moines Art Center are preserved here as well. He also created artwork for commercial entities. Shane apparently had many friends in the artistic community, and there are works by other artists included in this collection, including a small series of hand painted greeting cards sent to Shane by fellow artists.

Shane also worked as a reporter and columnist for the Des Moines Register for many years. His reporting for the Register was mostly human interest stories, but the majority of his stories were about art. For a time, he wrote a column called "The Visual Arts" and twice he took trips and sent articles back to the Register about the art he encountered -- from Venice and the continent in 1958 and from Mexico in 1966.