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.

The National Fairground Archive

The National Fairground Archive at the University Library, University of Sheffield, under the leadership of Professor Vanessa Toulmin, has holdings which document fairs, circuses, menageries, magic, optical shows, etc. A subject list gives the scope of the collection, which includes 4,500 books, 250 journals titles, moving images, photographs, drawings, audio material, correspondence, diaries, cuttings, account books, maps, charts, plans, teaching materials, notebooks etc, as well as ephemera: postcards, trade and advertising material, programmes, calendars, almanacs, posters, proclamations, and 20,000 posters and handbills. There are word processed indexes (currently under revision) to each of these genres.

(C) NFA, University of Sheffield

The site includes articles, bibliographies and links to other websites and resources.

Researchers can visit in person, without an appointment Monday to Wednesday, with an appointment on Thursday.  Opening hours are posted online.

The National Fairground Archive has just launched NFA digital, with images added weekly. 19,720 images are currently online  and these can be browsed or searched by collection, period, subject, place and name. The Search tips, especially the explanations of themes and subject terms, are very helpful.

You can follow the National Fairground item on Twitter: @professorvaness


The subscription site: Victorian Popular Culture (Adam Matthew) which will be covered more thoroughly in my next post, includes material from the National Fairground Archive

(C) NFA, University of Sheffield

Online Advent Calendars

I really like the online 'advent' calendars launched today, especially those of the Geffrye Museum, Oxford University Computing Services Open Advent calendar (24 open educational resources free to use, not just for Christmas) and the Regional Support Centre South East 'Appy Christmas calendar, which introduces educational apps, gadgets and tips.

©Geffrye Museum

 

My favourite so far is the University of Glasgow House of Fraser Archive Advent Calendar, which reveals a new Christmas image from the archive each day in a countdown to the launch of the online catalogue after Christmas Day. A fun way to introduce a new resource which, judging from the first image, will contain a lot of ephemera.

© UofG