Trying to Sell Something: Commercial Printed Ephemera
Earl D. Hart

Individuals, companies, agencies, and even governments constantly send printed advertisements to consumers to whom they are trying to sell something. These announcements form a body of printed matter identified as commercial ephemera.

Often intended to last only until a specific lot of goods has been sold, advertising fits the definition of ephemera something which has a short life or transitory existence; the papers of the day, born to die before the next morning.¹

Advertising is as old as civilization itself. Craftsmen like Paul Revere signed their creations in hopes of securing repeat business from satisfied customers. Merchants displayed signs to distinguish their shops and to identify themselves as members of appropriate guilds or unions. The development of the printing press provided a new medium for advertising, producing a printed document that the consumer could examine at home and save for future reference²

Although Gutenberg is credited with developing movable type in about 1437, not until the late seventeenth century did merchants begin printing sheets and cards to publicize merchandise currently in stock. In May 1704, the Boston Newsletter published the first paid American advertisement offering something for sale.³ Today, consumers and homeowners are inundated by floods of broadsides, handbills, pamphlets, cards, and letters from various companies located in Louisiana or with franchises in the state. This advertising may be hand-delivered to one’s door or sent through the mail; it may accompany a newspaper or be picked up at commercial establishments, welcome centers, or conventions.

The local or regional library has a duty to collect, to catalog, and to preserve materials on the cultural heritage of its area and to make them available to the community. A local collection should include all types of resources, dealing both with current documents and with historical materials. Collections of ephemera unfortunately have become associated with the private collector, libraries tend to purchase books, a secondary source of information based on ephemera, while neglecting the acquisition of ephemera itself–primary research materials which will provide vital data to future historians. Each library, when considering what should constitute an ephemera collection, must formulate a policy that meets local needs. Emphasis should be given to materials with geographical relevance, including works written by local authors, produced by local printers, or dealing with local subjects.⁴

The best places to find and to identify current examples of commercial ephemera are the mailbox, the desk, and the wastebasket, where most ephemera exits the home or office. Librarians face the responsibility of selecting the right items and discarding the bulk of the documents. Handbills, posters, and other commercial ephemera provide historical perspective, social insight, and visual stimuli. They are an aspect of our culture that should be preserved, but they should not be collected indiscriminately.

History of Commercial Ephemera

Advertisements in colonial newspapers were little more than announcements of whatever goods a merchant had in stock. Most products were traditional, and it was assumed that colonists knew what they wanted. Because news articles and advertisements were printed in the same size type, publishers identified the promotional entries with the heading "ADVERTISEMENT." Later, stock woodcuts of bottles, wagons, and other symbols highlighted advertising announcements.⁵

As the United States economy expanded, businessmen needed to develop markets for their goods. They employed trade cards, catalogs, billheads, posters, and other modes of advertising ephemera to create demand for new and unknown industrial products which included a variety of tools and devices for both work and home use. People had to be informed that products existed, and the printed advertisement became the primary means. America had entered the Industrial Revohnion.⁶

The technology that produced a surplus of goods and products also permitted advances in printing. Presses spread throughout the United States in the wake of advancing settlement. Large cities supported several publishers; by the mid 1850s New Orleans, for example, had ten newspapers. Large display type, which had been developed in France, began to appear m the United States. Advertisements from Macy’s and Lord & Taylor introduced displays that utilized engravings. Newspapers began to print advertisements that were three and four columns wale.⁷

A major advancement in advertising was the development of techniques that yielded inexpensive printed illustrations. In 1796 Aloys Senefelder, a German, developed the process of printing black-and-white lithographs using a smooth stone surface; improvements thirty years later made it possible to print lithographs in colors (chromolithography). Although this procedure was brought to the United States by emigrants about 1840, it was at first too expensive to use. By the 1860s, however, the commercial world exploded into color. Because most Americans had never seen an oil painting and commercial advertisements had always been printed in black and white, the luxuriantly colored chromolithographs represented real art to be collected. John James Audubon’s Birds of America, for example, was reproduced by Julius Bien of New York. Chromolithography gave rise to colorful brochures, flyers, and broadsides. Manufacturers of locomotives and patent medicine companies were among the first enterprises to use chromolithographs to advertise their products. By the 1870s Louis Prang, the father of the American Christmas card industry, had expanded applications of the technique to include holiday cards, trade cards, and posters.⁸

In 1878 Frederick Ives brought new life to black-and-white illustrations with his invention of the photographic process that produced halftones. This procedure filtered light rays of images through a screen to produce dots that were engraved on a copperplate. These engravings were used to print shades of gray. The finer the screen, the greater was the precision of detail. Printers, using a letterpress, experimented with halftones and colors (usually red or orange on black) to simulate full color. In 1924 the Saturday Evening Post introduced a method of printing illustrations four times, once each in red, blue, yellow, and black, to produce full color. Kodak’s development of color photography in 1935 revolutionized color printing by using one negative instead of three.⁹

Another major technological development was the invention in 1904 of the offset lithography press which could print in black and white or in color on standard paper. The letterpress, previously used, cost more to operate and required coated paper for color reproduction.¹⁰ Today, computers are used to design and to print advertisements in a variety of colors, tones, and fonts.

Themes in Advertising

Most manufacturing companies were small, and few employed advertising personnel. The owner, working with a printer, selected advertisements to promote his company. Advertising reflected the values and ideas that the businessman wanted to communicate to his customers. Merchants wanted to wean Americans from European goods and to encourage a sense of native pride in American products. Paramount among many themes in Victorian advertising were nationalism and progress, and Uncle Sam and other patriotic symbols became popular motifs. New products like commercial soaps claimed superiority over the old-fashioned lye soap that women made at home. Such progress would free women to care for their families. Advertisements displayed beautiful people in elegant surroundings, portraying a luxury to which businessmen, and presumably their customers, aspired. America was changing, and everyone should benefit from its progress.¹¹

Types of Advertisements

Trade Cards

Trade cards evolved from tradesmen’s signboards, which hung above a shop’s entrance and were the only form of trade publicity that antedated them. The emblem on the sign often was duplicated on the trade card with the tradesman’s name, occupation, and address. Early cards doubled as invoices or receipts. Lithography created a demand for illustrated trade cards, and large companies hired printers to design special cards engraved with their names, trades, and addresses. From a printer’s collection, small businessmen purchased illustrated cards that contained a blank area wherein the company’s name and address could be stamped.¹²

When chromolithographed cards appeared in the 1860s, the public rushed to collect the colored illustrations and to paste them in scrapbooks. Some commercial firms issued cards in series, hoping to entice the customer to return for the next card in the set, and offered prizes to those who amassed a specified number–usually twenty-five cards. Produced on silk, wood, metal, and celluloid, as well as paper, the trade card became the most prolific form of ephemera. With the advent of color advertising in magazines in the early 1890s, the public embraced a new collectible style of color advertisement, and interest in chromo trade cards declined. The business card, a descendant of the trade card, remains in popular use today.¹³

Most trade cards were rectangular in shape and contained a message and/or illustration on one or both sides. A specimen that promoted Clark’s thread depicted two boys flying a kite which had Clark’s Spool Cotton Thread as its string, thus implying the thread’s strength; on the reverse was an advertisement for a local merchant who carried Clark’s. Four other types of trade cards supplemented the basic pasteboard rectangle: mechanical, see-through, metamorphic, and die-cut cards. A mechanical trade card contained movable parts, like a paper wheel that turned, revealing a series of messages in a window. The wheel in a patent medicine card, for example, could be rotated to list the aches and pains that the medicine would cure.¹⁴

See-through cards were printed on paper so thin that holding them up to the light enabled the viewer to see additional words and illustrations that changed the cards’ messages. Similarly, the metamorphic card had folds and flaps that opened to create an image different from the one seen when the card was closed. A card might depict a person frowning, but when the bottom flap was opened, the individual then was smiling, presumably because the use of the advertiser’s product had relieved a toothache or some other problem. The die-cut or shape card might be cut in the form of a rabbit, train, house, or other figure. Kaufman & Isaacs, whose merchandise included men’s clothing, issued a card in the shape of an overcoat. One in the shape of a basket of violets read only "Jacobs, New Orleans"; Jacobs was not a florist but a confectioner. Often the illustrations on trade cards had nothing to do with the commodities they promoted (see Figures 1-2).

Billheads and Letterheads

A by-product of the trade card was the billhead. At one time merchants had used trade cards as invoices, but as firms began to distribute more products to a greater number of customers, they needed longer pieces of paper, and the billhead emerged. Its upper portion resembled a trade card, with the company’s name, trade, address, and insignia; the lower half contained columns for the date, description of items sold, price per item, number of items, and extension price. Billheads served as both invoice and receipt and provide historians with a primary document of commodities and services supplied, including quantity and cost. The billhead evolved into the letterhead.¹⁵

Many businessmen adopted billheads decorated with images of their stores or factories in an effort to impress customers, especially distant ones, with the firm’s stability and its building’s size.¹⁶ Others listed or depicted the merchandise with which they dealt, such as hats, stationery, or eyeglasses. John Douglas, a postbellum New Orleans engraver and lithographer, combined a roster of the types of work he did with examples of his skill. The large vignette at the top of his billhead (see Figure 3) is typical of designs that symbolized prosperity in America. Here, two women are seated in front of barrels of goods, sheaves of grain, and a stalk of corn, with a bag of money and a smoking factory in the background. A shield decorated with stars and stripes evocative of the American flag and a quiver filled with arrows rest on the ground; ships laden with goods sail to and from United States ports. Below, the customer was billed $11.50 for engraved cards for himself and his wife.

Posters

Posters rose in popularity in the 1860s and, like broadsides and handbills, were pasted to walls, fences, and other surfaces. Because of the temperance movement, advertising for whiskey, beer, and wine was banned from magazines, and makers of alcoholic beverages turned to posters which could be displayed in bars, restaurants, and taverns (see Figure 4). In the 1880s the popularity in France of posters by Toulouse-Lautrec, Cheret, and others led to the American poster craze a decade later. Exhibitions were held in cities all over the country, and many American illustrators, including Edward Penfield and Maxfield Parrish, became involved in the movement.¹⁷

Labels

Labels, in the nineteenth century a new advertising technique, existed to attract the attention and interest of potential customers and to do it rapidly. For many years Americans had not known the names of growers and processors who produced the food they ate. Grocers purchased commodities in bulk, unwrapped and unmarked, and sold them from sacks, bins, or barrels to the customer. Pioneered in the 1820s by the communal societies known as Shakers, labels identified the seeds, herbs, and other items the groups sold. In the 1850s and l860s, the rise of mass marketing, retail distribution, and especially packaging invested labels with new importance. By the late nineteenth century, increased competition gave further impetus to the use of labels, and they became a vital element of selling.¹⁸

Some products, and the labels that promoted them, are associated with certain sections of the country. Georgia, for example, produced pickles, peanut butter, and cane syrup, and Florida and California grew fruit. New Orleans specialized in coffee and chicory, packaged under the Women’s Club, Suffragette, Sum-Mo, Sum-Good, Honeymoon, and French Open labels, to name just a few. Other parts of Louisiana marketed a variety of other foodstuffs, including Tabasco Oysters from Avery Island, Liberty Strawberries from Tickfaw, and Hotel Bentley Pure Spices from Alexandria (see Figure 5). More than three hundred companies commissioned Walle & Co. a New Orleans lithographer, to print labels for these products and over five thousand others.¹⁹

Vendors’ Catalogs and Advertising Brochures

Do you like to shop? Vendors' catalogs of yesteryear offered a shopper the excitement of looking at quality merchandise of all sorts. To the historian they disclose what goods were available and at what prices. Bagur’s Clothes Shop in New Orleans, for example, offered hand-tailored clothing for men from Hart Schaffner & Marx (see Figure 6), and D.H. Holmes and other department stores distributed Christmas catalogs showing the latest fashions.²⁰ Sam H. James of Mound, Louisiana, promoted the pecans he grew, and in the l920sand l930s Solari’s, a New Orleans food store since 1861, published catalogs describing its mouth-watering offerings²¹ Bookstores listed titles to tempt customers, and music stores issued catalogs of musical instruments, sometimes illustrating the instruments and band uniforms. Other catalogs listed items scheduled to be sold at auction.²² Everything one needed could be found in one catalog or another.

Carrier’s Addresses

According to English custom, employers gave gratuities to tradesmen, servants, and other hirelings who called at their homes on New Year’s Day. As early as 1666, London bellhops offered printed messages while lingering for recompense. Newspaper carriers, with access to the donated services of journalists, illustrators, and printers, regularly proffered such missives to subscribers. By 1720 carrier’s addresses, as the newsboys’ bulletins came to be called, had spread to North America, where the earliest extant editions date from the 1730s. Few addresses were signed, but some have been attributed to prominent nineteenth-century politicians and writers. Notables who penned addresses for New England papers included Daniel Webster, John Greenleaf Whittier, Edward Everett Hale, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. "A Visit from St Nicholas" by Clement Clarke Moore was among memorable poems that first appeared in print as carrier’s addresses²⁴

Typical texts included, alone or in combination, a parody of a literary work; commemoration of social, historical, or political events; praise for the newspaper’s locality; observance of the old year’ s departure and the new one’s arrival; and a plea for alms. Louisiana addresses, most of them written in verse, emphasized the passage of time (see Figure 7) and the virtues of newsboys and the press. Carrier’s addresses disappeared from the scene during the early twentieth century, annihilated by abuses and by the commercialism of stock addresses that varied only in the name of the journal with which they were overprinted. To some extent, other annual giveaways filled the void left by their demise.²⁵

Calendars

Giveaways became a popular aspect of American commerce. Customers expected tradesmen to provide, at no cost, calendars, bookmarks, almanacs, and a variety of other tokens of appreciation for their patronage. Calendars, which were consulted often and kept the merchant’s name before the patron all year, ideally suited this purpose. Every kind of business distributed them. The Whitney Central Trust and Savings Bank in New Orleans, for example, provided calendars in several formats, including a series of postcards called "Art Mailing Cards." In addition to a one-month calendar, one side depicted a famous painting, a verse about the virtues of saving money, and the bank’s name, address, and rate of interest on savings the reverse resembled a modern postcard.

Bookmarks

Printers, grocers, bankers, booksellers, druggists, and other merchants gave away inexpensive bookmarks which presumably brought their names to the shopper’s attention whenever he opened his book. Illustrated with flowers, ladies in lacy bonnets, and children playing, many were stock designs with blank spaces to be overprinted with the names of the merchants who purchased them. A particularly charming example from D.H. Holmes was a die-cut egg from which a baby chick emerged; lettering announced a "Spring Opening." Although most businessmen handed giveaways to customers, the manufacturers of Mullen-01, a patent medicine, mailed a set of six bookmarks upon receipt of the carton from a ten-cent bottle of Mullen-0l or six cents in stamps.

Almanacs

Second only to the Bible as the most plentiful products of American publishing, almanacs were a mainstay of the colonial household dining the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They provided such useful information as astronomical data, tides, the distances between towns, and the best times for planting and harvesting, calculated for use in specified geographic regions. Most early almanacs were intended for farmers; later, specialization gave rise to comic almanacs, medical almanacs issued by manufacturers of patent medicines, and others, many of them replete with advertising. The first almanac known to have been published in Louisiana was Barthélemy Lafon’s Calendrier de Commerce de la Nouvelle-Orléans, pour l’Année 1807. Many other Louisiana and New Orleans editions followed, including a series of southern agricultural almanacs issued by New Orleans publisher B. M. Norman during the antebellum period. From these nineteenth-century publications, the World and Information Please almanacs descended.²⁶

Other Giveaways

Many firms found creative ways of boosting sales. Dixie Baking Powder, for example, collaborated with Gulf Manufacturing Company to publish a complimentary cookbook containing recipes that required the use of Dixie ingredients.²⁷ Casey & Casey, sellers of antiques, endeavored to spur interest in their stock with a brochure that provided background information on styles.²⁸ In 1921 the Southern Pine Association issued a brochure containing fifty floor plans for building a house and offered to assist the homebuilder to calculate costs of the requisite labor and materials.²⁹ The same year the Merchants Coffee Company of New Orleans issued a coloring book depicting scenes from fairy tales, complete with watercolor paints, and offered prizes to the children who best colored the pictures and drew the company’s trade mark³⁰

Conclusion

Just as advertising of the past opens a window on an earlier era, so will the ephemera of today shed light on our generation for future historians. They will see flyers that ask "Have you seen this child?," educational leaflets from organizations seeking to stem the spread of AIDS, printed grocery bags, and a plethora of other ephemera–that is, if librarians and collectors save it.

References

¹ The Oxford English Dictionary. 1st ed., s.v. "ephemera."

²Robert Jay, The Trade Card in Nineteenth-Century America (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1987), 1.

³ Ibid.; Jack Golden, "Business, Advertising, Printing and Ephemera," Ephemera

2(1989): 3.

⁴Albert Rosin, "La bibliothêque, mémoire de la vie locale d’hier et aujourd'hui" [Translated ‘The Library, Memory of Local Life Yesterday and Today"], Mediathêques Publiques 69 (1984): 27-30 (LISA Abstract # 85-1246); David Reid, "Ephemera and Loca1 Studies," New Library World 80 (1979): 174-176; Nik Pollard," Arty Choke: Acquisitions and Ephemera," Art Library Journal 2 (1977): 4-15; François Hauchecorne, "Fonds local et regional" [Translated: "Local and Regional Collections"], Bulletin Bibliothêque Française 27 (1982): 25-30 (LISA Abstract # 82-5650).

⁵ Golden, "Business," 3.

⁶ Pamela Walker Lurito, "The Heritage of Victorian Progress: American Advertising Ephemera in Historical Perspective," Ephemera Journal 1 (1987): 15.

⁷Golden, "Business," 4.

⁸ Ibid., 7-10; Maurice Rickards, Collecting Printed Ephemera (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988), [90]; Lurito, "Victorian Progress," 15-16.

⁹ Golden, "Business," 14-15.

¹⁰ Ibid., 17-18.

¹¹ Lurito, "Victorian Progress," 16-18.

¹²Rickards, Collecting Printed Ephemera, 104.

¹³ "Ibid.; Golden, "Business," 10.

¹⁴ Jack Golden, "Trade Cards: Advertising of Yesteryear," The Encyclopedia of Collectibles: Telephones to Trivets (Alexandria, Vs.: Time-Life Books, 1980), 112.

¹⁵ Rickards, Collecting Printed Ephemera, [113].

¹⁶ Ibid., 114-117.

¹⁷ Golden, "Business," 10-11.

¹⁸ Rickards, Collecting Printed Ephemera, 118; Jay T. Last, "California Orange Box Labels," Ephemera Journal 1(1987): 11; Ray Soper, "Fruit-Crate Labels: Glowing Promises of Goodness," The Encyclopedia of Collectibles: Folk Art to Horse-drawn Carriages (Alexandria, Va.: Time-Life Books, 1978), 30, 38.

¹⁹ Soper, "Fruit-Crate Labels," 38; Larry Bartlett, "From Yesterday’s Grocery Shelf," New Orleans Times-Picayune (Dec. 4, 1977): Dixie, 4049.

²⁰ Style Book, Spring and Summer 1911 (Chicago: Hart Schaffner & Marx, [1911]);

e.g., D.H. Holmes Co., Ltd., Christmas 1952 ([New Orleans: The Company, 1952]). These and other ephemera cited herein are available at the Historic New Orleans Collection.

²¹ Sam James’ Pecan Catalogue (Mound, La.: S. James, 1910); Good Things to Eat from All the World ([New Orleans]: A.M. & J. Solari (Firm), [1920s-1930s]).

²² E.g., F.F. Hansell & Bro., Booksellers, Selected List of Books for Boys and Girls ([New Orleans]: Hansell, [ca. 1930s?]); D.H. Holmes Co., Ltd., The Latest Books (New Orleans: Holmes, 1925); e.g., Louis Grunewald, Illustrated Catalog (New Orleans: L. Graham & Son, [1880?]).

²³ E.g., Catalogue of the Splendid Library of the Late L. Placide Canonge, to be Sold at Public Auction... ([New Orleans: s. n., 1894?]).

²⁴ Mary Russo, "Carrier’s Addresses, 1720-1900: Stirring Newsboy’s Stanzas Struck Responsive Chord with Patrons," Ephemera Journal 1 (1987): 33-36.

²⁵ Ibid., 36.

²⁶ John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, Vol. I: The Creation of an Industry, 1630-1865 (New York: Bowker, 1972), 34, 545-548; Florence M. Jumonville, Bibliography of New Orleans Imprints, 1764-1864 (New Orleans: Historic New Orleans Collection, 1989), passim.

²⁷ Dixie Pastry Cook Book (New Orleans: Gulf Manufacturing Co., [1893?]).

²⁸ Useful Information on Furniture Periods (New Orleans: Casey & Casey, [19-]).

²⁹ Modern Homes (New Orleans: Southern Pine Association, 1921).

³⁰ Our Little Artist (New Orleans: Merchants Coffee Co., [1921]).

Earl D. Hart is associate professor of library science at the University of New Orleans.

The Ephemera Society acknowledges with thanks the editor of Louisiana Libraries for granting permission to reproduce this article from Volume 53, Number 2, published in Fall 1990.