Fresh Items
This ephemera world of ours is just chock-full of interesting stuff. Here are some things I’ve recently come across.
A simple little diecut label, yet printed letterpress in three colors, on a coated stock.
I always loved this example of Victorian imagination, picked up this one as an upgrade for a damaged copy in my collection.
This lively treatment of the word “ALMANAC” is of course great.
Inside is a useful sort of thing, new to me . . . a table giving the meantime it takes a human to digest various items of food. And fascinating are some of the 19th-century table items listed; including soused tripe, animal brains, sago, spinal marrow, aponeurosis (don’t ask me, I have no idea), old hard salted beef, tendon (5 1/2 hours for that).
This is something I have not happened to see before . . . two otherwise identical 32-pages plus covers booklets, one with full-color front and back covers, the other printer using just the black plate.
A wonderful image which immediately makes its main point without words . . . the folks at the Chicago Globe are night owls who work through the night so that the latest news will be printed and available at first light.
A 1961 postcard with nicely painted portraits of (left to right) a Brown Swiss, Jersey, Holstein, Ayrshire, and Guernsey cow.
Copy on the back says, among other things, “I offer a specialty of starched work, such as shirts, shams, lace curtains. ladies’ dresses, collars and cuffs, and everything in the starched line. COLLARS AND CUFFS ARE WASHED WITH THE HANDS, NOT RUBBED ON THE BOARD.”
1960’s patch.
Try to find one of these in fifty years.
While printers in the United States were practicing their own style of Artistic Printing, British printers developed their own “Leicester Style”, of which this is a top-notch example.
An example of a clean, effective 1950s design.
I’ve always been partial to usages of mortised stock cuts, never happened upon this particular one before.
A New York City investment bank offering their opinion of the state of the market in June 1890 (not long before the Panic of 1893).
A nice example of an early printer’s card, letterpress on paper stock.
The beautifully rendered image on this oversize trade card perfectly shows that the product is a pill for headaches.
Elegant and direct melding of word content and image.
I find this a telling slice of time, at that moment between the horse and the automobile, right at the moment with a foot in each era.
Très élégant engraved card by Davis. (Fellow ESA member and greeting cards expert Anne O’Donnell is reported to be preparing some articles for this blog, which I for one look very much forward to enjoying!)