American Advertising

The Art of American Advertising 1865-1910 is an exhibition at the Baker Library of the Harvard Business School. Drawing extensively on its historical collections, the exhibition takes an analytical approach to the use of art in relation to its themes:: National Markets, Advertising Products, Trade Catalogs, Trade Cards, Souvenirs & Novelties, Scrapbooks & Collectibles, The Art of 'Posting',  Brand Name Management, and A Marketing Revolution.

The online version is extensively  illustrated and can be seen either as a series of illustrated essays, or as galleries.

(C) Harvard Business School. Baker Library

Meanwhile, the Winterthur Museum Library has impressive online content relating to its advertising collections, with thousands of images. The numbers attached to the suggested searches speak for themselves. This is a very rich resource: Book industries (83), Clocks and watches (328), Clothing and dress (235), Department stores/Dry goods (173), Food (261), Furniture (492), Jewelry (414), Medicine (187), Music (156), Pottery (59), Sewing (234), Stoves (114), Tobacco (149), Advertisements (125), Poster stamps (1840), Trade cards (4018), Textile fabrics (94).

There is more: much more: images of Bookplates, French candy wrappers, Funeral and Mourning Ephemera (the William Frost Mobley Collection), Indentures, Lantern Slides, and 171 calendars and 295 cigar labels from the Grossman Collection. The image quality is outstanding, with zoom enabling every detail of the printing process (chromolithography in the case of the Grossman collection) to be studied.

All collections have overviews, outlining their extent and scope. The Grossman Collection, which I was privileged to see many years ago in California, has c. 250,000 items of high-quality ephemera.

I also particularly like the click-through facility in all fields, which enables you to see images of trellis, for example, across the collections.

As described in a previous post, more than 900 trade catalogs are available through the Internet Archive.

Content is continually being added and subscriptions to RSS feeds are available at collection level.

Ephemera at Chetham's Library, Manchester

Chetham's Library in Manchester has rich collections of printed ephemera, most of which are catalogued, including bookplates, postcards, chapbooks, broadsides, ballads, theatre programmes, posters, trade cards and bill heads.

The Chethams website has a very useful guide to discrete collections of rare books and printed ephemera, notable among which are the Halliwell-Phillipps collection (donated to the library in 1852), a fne collection of scrapbooks of local material and the Belle Vue zoo and gardens archive.

(C) Chetham's Library, Manchester

There is project to digitise ballads across all Manchester libraries, including the newly-acquired (and already indexed) Robert Holt Collection of Manchester Street Songs and Ballads.

British ephemera from the Lewis Walpole Library

After a brief interlude, to collect Jubilee ephemera (great response so far)....

I was very excited to receive an email from Susan Walker at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, alerting me to their recent-ish digitisation of Trade cards and invitations, Trade tokens and bookplates and Ballads and broadsides. These last are divided into Volume 1,  Volume 2,  and Volume 3.  Of course, all are fully cross-searchable through the Lewis Walpole Digital Collection.

Being the Lewis Walpole Library, this material is 18th century. The trade cards come from two albums, the first dating from 1733 to 1769, the second from 1705 to 1799 (with most from 1757 to 1758). They constitute a wonderful, rich and rare resource and add greatly to the available 18th century British trade cards online.

(C) The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

The high resolution images enable the cards, invitations and ballads to be studied in detail.

Other treasures in the Walpole Library's Digital Collection include political prints and satires.

British Museum

The British Museum has superb collections of ephemera, mainly in the Dept of Prints and Drawings.

For bookplates and prints the BM catalogues are the standard reference works.

All three volumes of the Catalogue of the Franks Collection of British and American Bookplates in the British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings are now available online, thanks to a digitisation initiative by the University of Toronto.

The museum is putting increasing numbers of prints and ephemera online through its Collection database. At 21/11/11 there were 18,626 entries online under book plate.
 
There are 31,899 political prints online (which I found by entering satirical prints in the free text search).

© Trustees of the British Museum

The invaluable catalogue: Stephens, Frederic George; George, Mary Dorothy, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, 11 vols, London, BMP, 1870 is also available online through the University of Toronto, together with a wealth of other reference works relating to prints at the museum.


The BM's collections of  British 18th and 19th century trade cards (the Heal and Banks collections) are unsurpassed. There are currently 14,754 trade cards online.

There is also a new online research catalogue of the museum's Paper Money (nearly 20% already online), with articles on banking history, security printing, etc.

© Trustees of the British Museum