Advertising Trade Cards

'The lean and slipper'd pantaloon with spectacles on his nose'
IL Cragin & Co - Dobbins Electric Soap
Premium card exchange collection (verse from 'As You Like It')
Multicolour lithography/letterpress in Philadelphia {1880-1900}





Definitely the weirdest image I've seen this week. Presumably they shared the same premises. How on earth did they decide on such an elegant Britannia engraving and script? Although I'm (fairly) sure it's just age-related chance, the splattered appearance seems somehow appropriate. {Slop Merchant being a seller of goods to ships/military - thanks biteyourowntail}



















































The pair of Tub Soap girls and the Soapine carriage advertisement {~1880} are of particular interest because the artist/lithographer was Charlotte Perkins Gilman (neice of Harriet Beecher Stowe) who would later become a notable writer/social reformer and feminist. Her 1892 short story 'The Yellow Wallpaper' was a first hand account of post-partum depression and suffering at the hands of (learned) quackery. The great medical minds of the day recommended isolation from family, near-total bed rest, restriction of intellectual activity and occasional application of electricity to the muscles. See: i, ii, iii.


These are somewhat random selections from the Early Advertising Collection (900 images) at the excellent Triptych digital initiative of Bryn Mawr, Haverford and Swarthmore College Libraries.

This was also something of an experi-mental post: I just wanted to check out Webshots as an image host. Click on any of the images above and then on the '+' button below the flash window to see the full size version. I guess there are advantages and disadvantages. While I'm constructing this post there appears to be excessive digital compression artifact - much more than I would normally get if I resized the images myself. Hm. Any thoughts?