A few months ago I stopped into the kind of store you can find easier in Paris than anywhere else–full of old advertising art, vintage posters, and ancient maps. Next to nothing cost under 100 euros, and if I were rich, I would decorate 20 houses with the posters I found in there. I’m not rich.

I did still manage to find some beautiful prints around Paris, though. The great thing about all the green-stalled vendors that line the Seine is the variety of their stuff; they don’t have the exact same posters and cards that their neighbour has, and a lot of it is a step above the mass-produced vintage reprints more widely available. I bought a ton of it and it’s still all over my walls.

For those of us, however, who no longer have a fast train connection to Paris, there are other ways of decorating with some of the best old illustration and cartography available. Sure, you can order about 17 billion different prints online, but the minimum cost for a poster is often above $20–a quick glance at the “Italian Maps” section of barewalls.com shows an amazing 3/4 map of Rome, and it costs $31.50. Not the end of the world, but not ridiculously cheap either.

I recently spent some time back in my native Canada, and figured that on my return to Europe I’d hit whatever old, dustry print shops I could find (there are really 17,0000 of them in every big European city) and get to decorating my new walls. I didn’t expect to find much in Ottawa, but as I was wandering around a paper shop I suddenly saw a beautiful, faux-aged vintage map of Rome. Then I saw another hundred copies of the same map below it. They were hanging over a little bar, nestled in among other big pieces of paper featuring small dogs and various forgettable patterns. The price? $3.95. I’d just found my new, cheap-as-hell decorating source: wrapping paper.

The company that makes these maps is Cavallini & Co., they have a sizeable line of them, and they’re all worth a look. Sure, it’s just gift paper and obviously not as strong as a real poster, but that’s the whole point–you can buy 4 or 5 of these for the price of a single poster. And there’s actually something about the texture and consistency of the wrapping paper that serves the vintage theme rather well.

Most of these are 20″ x 28″ sizes, which you know is just fine for your wall. There are also several selections of vintage advertising illustration, some of which I received half-wrapped around some recent books I got–my friend didn’t even tape the wrapping paper, she just hastily placed the books inside and treated the gift-wrapping as a gift in itself. It’s on my wall as a result.

You can find the Cavallini & Co. wrapping paper online here, here, or here.

And here are a few other examples of gift wrap that can easily double as posters, and cost nothing:

The French Paper Company also has a ton of quality wrapping paper that can be used for other stuff too, and Whimsy’s Dude Wrap “Paper Invaders” edition is awesome as well.