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.

American Antiquarian Society update: GIGI

Since my post in January 2012, the American Antiquarian Society has launched its Digital Image Archive, called GIGI with beautifully presented tif-format thumbnails. This is in addition to other stand-alone digital projects and online exhibitions. Of particular interest to ephemerists are the 1415 broadsides (Browse and select broadsides).  A keyword search for ephemera yields 3018 results at the time of writing (of 10,000 results from a keyword search in the General Catalogue). There are links from the catalogue into GIGI where appropriate, so the advice to scholars is to start there.

All very exciting for those of us who don't have Readex and want to browse the collections of the AAS.   There is advanced searching too within GIGI.



Search for broadside in GIGI (C) American Antiquarian Society

A list of collections represented includes the following categories of ephemera:
Album cards; Billheads; Broadsides; Christmas cards; Civil War envelopes; Currency; Election Ballots; Invitations; Membership Certificates; Menus; Postcards; Ream Wrappers; Sheet Music; Trade Cards; Valentines; and Watch papers from Graphic Arts, and Trade catalogs from Books. There are also hundreds of prints.

The AAS blog also has posts about ephemera (e.g. the recent post about Irish ballads for St. Patrick's Day) and a very active Twitter account: @AmAntiquarian

Patent Medicines at Hagley Museum and Library

The Patent Medicine online exhibition (Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE) is designed to show a small portion of their holdings of Patent Medicine material. The exhibition is divided into Almanacs, Photographs, Advertising, Trade Catalogs, and Manuscripts, and has sections on the History of Patent Medicine and Advertising and Branding.

There are links from the exhibition to Hagley Digital Archives, which provides larger images, some metadata and the facility to purchase images. Users can also add tags and comments.  I will return to Hagley Digital Archives in a future post.

(Hagley Museum and Library)

Seed catalogues 3: The US National Agricultural Library

The National Agricultural Library (United States Department of Agriculture) has, within its Special Collections, a major collection of seed catalogues: The Henry G. Gilbert Nursery and Seed Trade Catalog Collection. There are 200,000 catalogues, from America and a wide range of other countries (including Britain), mostly from 1890 to the present but with some dating back to the late 18th century. The image gallery presents selected covers of catalogues from the US by period (1750-1875, 1876-1900, 1901-1925) and from Japan, mostly from the Yokohama Nursery Co,. Ltd.

(C) National Agricultural Library (United States Department of Agriculture)

The Library also has a collection of posters relating to the Women's Land Army, War, Rural Electrification Administration, and the World's Poultry Congress.

Seed catalogues 2: The John Johnson Collection

The early seedsmen's catalogues in the John Johnson Collection were identified and removed to guardbooks. They are cited in the pioneering work of John Harvey in Early horticultural catalogues: a checklist of trade catalogues issued by firms of nurserymen and seedsmen in Great Britain and Ireland down to the year 1850, . The shelfmarks (Johnson a.50 and Johnson d.1640) can be searched for in SOLO  Other Bodleian seed catalogues can be found by keyword searches on SOLO, or by referring to the annotated copy of Harvey (op cit) on the open shelves in the Special Collections Reading Room.

Seedsmen's lists and later catalogues remain in the Horticulture section (boxes and outsize folders).   The catalogues have not yet been digitised, except for Oxford seedsmen and nurserymen, which fall within Oxford Trade (box 5). These are available through the ProQuest project: The John Johnson Collection: an archive of printed ephemera. Notable are late 19th century catalogues by C.B. Anstey.

Trade cards for Horticulture, Nurserymen and Seedsmen (Trade Cards 14 (2-14)) are available through the JJ online catalogue.

The image below shows a broadside Catalogue of American trees and shrubs that will endure the climate of England, issued by Christopher Grey/Gray, nurseryman in Fulham, c. 1740. He was the first to receive Magnolia grandiflora from North America into Britain, and to propogate it, in c. 1734.

John Johnson Coll. Horticulture large folder

Seed catalogues 1: Oregon State University Libraries

It is National Gardening Week, and this seems a very good time to focus on seed catalogues.

Oregon State University Libraries Special Collections has a very useful and well presented online exhibit on early seed catalogues, based on the collection assembled by the former agricultural librarian, Laura Kelts. There are over 2,000 items in the collection, from 1832 to 1966, which include seed catalogues from Great Britain, Holland and other European and Asian countries, as well as (predominantly) North America. The holdings are particularly strong in North American catalogues of the 1940s.

The website gives the history of both British and American seed catalogues. It is divided into pages on the Earliest European seed and nursery catalogues, Early 19th century catalogues (with separate pages for British and American catalogues, Mid 19th century,  Late 19th and early 20th century, World War I, 1920s, 1930s, World War II and 1945-1960.  The appendices are devoted to Art and photography in seed catalogues and, perhaps most useful of all, there is an excellent page of links to other collections and exhibits, mostly in the USA, but also in Britain, Holland and Canada and introducing the Lindley Library (Royal Horticultural Society) project to locate all European seed catalogues, and a separate Bibliography.  Which is why I have called this Seed catalogues I: there is much more to explore!

Geffrye Museum trade catalogues

The Geffrye Museum has announced a monthly programme of putting online its extensive collection of trade catalogues of household goods. Only five (in their entirety) so far, but an invaluable resource in time.

(C) Geffrye Museum

The museum website also has an extensive collection of wallpapers and textile sample books.  Twenty three satirical prints are online too, providing a "rich and unexpected insight into the decoration of the domestic interior."

Trade catalogues in the Winterthur Museum Library

The Winterthur has contributed to the Internet Archive the printed catalogue: The trade catalogues at Winterthur: a guide to the literature of merchandising, 1750 to 1980 by E. Richard McKinstry, New York, 1984.  It can be read online, downloaded as a pdf, downloaded to Kindle, viewed as full text, etc. It is searchable (I found the pdf version easiest) and there are also excellent chronological, geographical and alphabetical indexes.  The catalogue is annotated with Winterthur shelfmarks.

Although predominantly American, there are many trade catalogues from other countries, notably c. 150 from  England, including many from the 18th and early 19th centuries starting with East India House, 1750.  Other countries represented are Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Northern Ireland, Portugal, Russia, Scotland, Singapore, and Switzerland.


The catalogue is divided into subject areas: Agricultural implements and machiney, Architectural building plans and materials, Art supplies, Brass goods, Ceramics and glassware, Clothing and accessories, Department and dry goods stores and misc, Ecclesiastical and funerary supplies, Entertainment, leisure activities and recreational goods, Food and refrigeration, Furniture, Garden and lawn supplies and ornament, Hardware, cutlery, utensils and hand tools, Iron and steel goods, Jewellery and clocks and watches, Lighting fixtures and electrical supplies, Measuring implements, Medical and health supplies, Musical instruments and supplies, Paint and varnish, Paintings and prints, Photography, Plumbing, heating and cooling equipment, Printers' equipment and publications, Silver and silver-plated goods, Stationery and office supplies, Statuary, Stoves, Vehicles and equestrian supplies, and Wall and floor coverings.

(C) Internet Archive and Winterthur Musuem

Also in the Intenet Library is the Guide to the microfiche edition of Trade catalogues at the Winterthur Museum, part 2 by Eleanor McD Thompson (1991).

Entries can  also be found for the trade catalogues through the Winterthur Library online catalogue: Wintercat.

Smithsonian's Instruments for Science

The Smithsonian Libraries Instruments for Science, 1800-1914: scientific trade catalogs in Smithsonian Collections, is a digital resource searchable by company (with drop down list), type of instrument, title, keyword, etc. (try theodolite, for example). It is international, with British, French and German firms as well as American. The screen shot shows catalogues for Negretti and Zambra of Holborn Viaduct, London. Trade catalogues have rarely survived and contain a wealth of information.  The introduction page contains two essays on scientific trade catalogues, by Steven Turner and Jim Roan.

(C) Smithsonian Institution

American Antiquarian Society

The American Antiquarian Society is a major repository for American ephemera, notably early material, outlined in the excellent online Guide to ephemera.  A major digitial resource is only available by subscription: American Broadsides and Ephemera, Series I, 1760-1900 (Readex Division of NewsBank).

There is much else to explore in the AAS website.

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(C) American Antiquarian Society

 
The Guide to the Collections gives an overview in two columns: one by subject grouping, the other alphabetical, with icons showing which have been digitised. Links lead to a series of web pages introducing the category and outlining the resources at the AAS.

There is a very useful genre listing, which gives the cataloguing and listing status of each category.  From this, those which are of most interest to ephemerists are: Almanacs, Billheads, Bookplates and booksellers' labels, Booksellers' catalogues, Broadsides, Calendars, Calling card, Canadiana, Cartes de visite, Civil war cartoons, Civil war envelopes, Clipper ship cards, Election ballots, Ephemera, Games, Invitations, Lottery tickets, Menus, Paul Revere Collection, Postcards, Printing and publishing history, Rewards of merit, Sentiment cards, Songsters, Textile printing, Trade cards, Trade catalogues, although there is clearly more ephemera kept under subject.   Of these, almanacs, booksellers' catalogues, broadsides, Canadiana, printing and publishing history, songsters, and trade catalogues are partially catalogued.  Priority has been given to early material.  The online catalogue, which includes many records for ephemera, can be searched by genre as well as keyword, subject, name, etc.

Some collections have been digitised and are available online in the form of Illustrated inventories. The important  Paul Revere Collection contains 18th century trade cards, certificates, masonic ephemera, prints and much else, all described and digitsed in an Illustrated Inventory.  There are also subject tags, a searchable pdf, list of resources and thumbnail gallery (shown in screen shot).

(C) American Antiquarian Society

The Charles Peirce Collection of Social and Political Caricatures and Ballads is also fully digitised and is also notable for its interractive view of the album before it was disassembled. These political cartoons are supplemented by The European Political Print Collection.  Ambrotypes and daguerrotypes also have fully illustrated inventories.

The AAS holds an important archive of McLoughlin Bros. catalogues, price lists and order forms, available as full-colour pdfs, and also some 50 volumes of Louis Prang's salesmen's books featuring greetings cards.

There is also an invaluable 19th century American Children's Book Trade Directory.

Online exhibitions include Big Business Food Production, Making Valentines, Visions of Christmas, and A Woman's Work is Never Done, all of which feature ephemera.

World of Kays (University of Worcester)

Mail-order catalogues from Kay & Co. Ltd, of Worcester, are the focus of World of Kays, a JISC-funded project at the University of Worcester. Not only does the site include1500 images from 1920-2000, film and audio interviews with ex-Kays staff and local residents, but members of the public are invited to comment on the images from their own experience or contribute stories. You can search by type and purpose of garment, season and date, and restrict to men, women or children. There are pages on the history of 20th century fashion and body image, videos, and a blog. The project is on Facebook and Twitter: @WorldofKays

The catalogues are part of a larger archive of business records relating to Kay & Co. Ltd, deposited by the Kays Heritage Group and held as part of the Research Collections at the University of Worcester.

© University of Worcester
© Kays Heritage Group.

Trade catalogues at the V&A and Manchester Metropolitan University Library

The Victoria and Albert Museum is one of the few British institutions to have collected (and to continue to collect) trade catalogues. Often falling between books and ephemera, these fascinating documents are rare.  The trade catalogues, which date from the 1760s to the present, are split between the National Art Library (Jobbing Printing and EKCO collections) and the Archive of Art and Design (Liberty, Heal and others from within archive collections). These collections are not digitised. Readers' tickets and appointments are required.

Another major British collection of trade catalogues is held at Manchester Metropolitan University Library, where an exhibition was held in 1992 with a catalogue by Gaye Smith: Trade Catalogues: A Hundred Years, 1850-1949  (Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University Library, 1992).

(C) V&A