COMPLIMENTARY COPY TM
The Most Widely Read Collector's Newspaper In The East Published Weekly By Joel Sater Publications www.antiquesandauctionnews.net
VOL. 45, NO. 52 FRIDAY DECEMBER 26, 2014
Victorian-Era Santa Claus Trade Cards Offer Festive Advertising saga of the industrial revolution. People’s fascination with them created a demand so strong that few businesses or manufacturers, large or small, failed to use them to promote their wares. The 1880s and 1890s were peak years and the quality and quantity of advertising cards produced is truly remarkable. It was a golden age for these masterpieces of illustration and advertising. From the beginning, they were especially plentiful during the Christmas season to promote individual stores and specific merchandise. Far and away the favorites of children and adults alike were advertising cards picturing Santa Claus. The popularization of Santa throughout the nation also seems to have coincided with the birth of modern marketing and advertising. Early businessmen sensed the potential of turning Santa Claus into a spokesman. Actually, Santa Claus and Christmas itself had not fared too well in Colonial America and the early United States. In the New England states, the Puritans were successful in once banning holiday festivities. In the South, though celebrated for generations, it was more a special day for adults than a holiday for children. The adoration of Santa and the custom of his yearly Christmas Eve rounds to bring gifts to deserving boys and girls was for a Kris Kringle is dropping a spool of long-time confined to New York. Kerr’s Cotton Thread down a chimDutch immigrants had brought ney (1890s) on this card.
By Roy Nuhn
iven away free by merchants, found inside packages and tins of various products, and available through the mail, trade cards were once a major advertising medium. These miniature chromolithographs were immensely popular with the public, who saved and cherished them in special albums. Provided by all kinds of merchants, vendors and manufacturers, they touted a wide range of products and services. Trade cards played an important role in the early history of America’s advertising industry and a small part in the unfolding
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This 1890s trade card was derived from the company’s retail point-ofpurchase metal sign of the same era.
A trade card for Boston’s Schwarz This 1890s trade card is for Holmes Bazaar Store (1880-85 era). & Coutts English Biscuits and Sea contained advertising messages Foam Wafers.
and captions relevant to the goods or service being sold. And some, among the best St. Nicholas to America when they ever produced, were published by settled New Amsterdam. Over the individual companies with illusyears they continued to soften trations having a direct tie-in to “Sinter Klas’” patriarchal Old their product. An 1880s trade card, World image. for instance, by Mr. Potts’ Cold In 1822, Clement C. Moore Handle Irons, portrays Santa Claus wrote his immortal “A Visit from with a sleigh full of irons, speedSt. Nicholas” (often referred to as ing past signs advertising the gift “The Night Before Christmas”). idea. On other cards, a sewing This light-hearted poem was based machine, bar of soap, or other conin large part upon Washington sumer item is part of the drawing. Irving’s writing of a decade earliMost of the Santa Claus and er. Aided by famed American Christmas trade cards were distributed by stores and firms as small tokens of holiday good wishes to their customers. But they almost always carried a little bit of a commercial message as well. Many of these Victorian-era masterpieces have survived down through the years and are today lovingly preserved and displayed by collectors. The most beautiful of all Santa Claus advertising cards are thought to be those once distributed nationally by Woolson Spice Company of Toledo, Ohio. These were insert premiums, usually 5-by-7-inches, found inside of one-pound packages of their Lion Coffee. The Woolson Spice cards were produced in large quantities In 1891, the Woolson Spice over a 20-year span, with each Company advertised their Lion new holiday season during the Brand Coffee on this card. 1890s bringing a new set of Christmas and Santa Claus scenes. By the turn of the century, A Star Soap 1890s trade card from Schultz & Co., Zanesville, Ohio. however, interest in advertising cards sharply declined as the public became caught up in a new fad imported from Europe, the picture postcard. Also, more and more reliance was being placed on advertising in mass circulation magazines by ad agencies. Advertising cards are in relatively plentiful supply, considering they are over a century old. Prices range from $25 for less quality, general stock designs, while the very best lithographic gems, such as those by Woolson Spice, can tall up to $100 or more. Such cards are eagerly sought by folks anxious to add to their collections or to help decorate homes at Santa urges his reindeer on their way with another shipment of Mrs. Potts A stock trade card used by different toy stores nationwide to promote their Christmas-time, just as people did many generations ago. irons on this card. merchandise line of Christmas books and toys. illustrator Thomas Nast’s imaginative cartoons and drawings, Santa Claus, his reindeer and much of his legend entered the mainstream of American culture. It was primarily Nast’s interpretation of Santa, as drawn for Harper’s Weekly from 1862 to 1889, that steadily came to be used as a sort of super salesman by the nation’s business community. The emergence of St. Nick as an American tradition took place as the Christmas holiday itself increasingly became one of festive celebration, laden with ritual and folklore. Christmas scenes on advertising cards reflected this new cultural outlook. By the middle of the 1880s, and for roughly the next 15 years, Santa Claus illustrations on trade cards were very much a part of the glad happenings every Yuletide season. The majority of Santa Claus and Christmas trade cards were all-purpose stock-types printed with general scenes and sold in wholesale quantities to many different companies, large and small. These often can be found with numerous different overprints that were added by individual stores or businesses to personalize them. Some, with special illustrations and texts, were made for use by a specific type of store, such as toy shop or import bazaar. They