Tag Archives: advertising

February 4, 2012

Corporate Interiors

By daseger

I like reading contemporary shelter magazines, but they seldom offer any advice for one of my central decorating dilemmas: how to integrate the front Federal part of my home with the rear Victorian addition (never mind the kitchen from the 1920s and other architectural details from that “renovation” scattered around the house). So I thought I’d browse (digitally) through some “house beautiful” books from the later nineteenth century, to see if they could offer any tips or inspiration. There are lots available on the Internet Archive, but (apart from Edith Wharton’s writing style) I didn’t find them very inspiring, or nearly as interesting as the trade catalogs of the same era. It seems like much of the Winterthur Library’s collection of these publications is now available in digital formal. These catalogs range from mere brochures to actual decorating books, published by wallpaper, fabric, paint, carpet, and furniture companies for both wholesale and retail customers, I suppose. I’m sure that I’m far from the first to recognize that they must be an extremely valuable resource for charting changing styles.

Below are a couple of plates from Suggestions for Modern Interior Decoration, published by the Henry Bosch wallpaper company of Chicago and New York in 1906. The entire book consists of plates of interior vignettes, followed by appropriate wallpaper samples; here’s a very Arts & Crafts sitting room with entrance hall in the background.

Next, the cover and “Boston Room” of the 1917 Home Decorations Book published by the Star Peerless Wallpaper Mills, manufacturers of “Black Cat Wallpapers” for the home. The Boston Room is of course in an understated “colonial” style. For a stark contrast, I’ve jumped forward several decades, to the eve of World War II, and a very dynamic bedroom in the 1939 catalog of the Celotex Corporation, Interiors with Beauty, Comfort and Quiet. Quite an interesting combination of colors there; not very quiet.

Paint companies, including Sherwin-Williams and Glidden, really ran with the “decorating catalog” concept before and after World War One. A 1910 billiard room demonstrated “handicrafted effects” from Sherwin-Williams Your Home and its Decoration, and (again for contrast) two decades later a very bright (and much less crafty) living room appears in The Home of To-Day (1930). For a post-war view, I’ve also included a colorful bathroom from Glidden’s 1946 catalog, The Key to Color Harmony in Your Home. This book really recommends the color combination of aqua, pink and brown, and not only for bathrooms.

Back to a browner age. My last two images don’t really fit in with those above–rather than interior vignettes offering decorating advice as well as goods they are examples of more standard advertising–but the lithography is so striking I wanted to include them. Below are two pages from the undated Album of Maine’s Atkinson House Furnishing Company, established in 1884 and “the only in the US doing business under a special contract system and Installment Plan”: the exterior of its main Portland store and the interior sales floor, an actual corporate interior.

4 Comments | tags: advertising, Interior design, print culture | posted in Design, History

January 16, 2012

McIntire for Sale

By daseger

On this day in 1757 Samuel McIntire, the architect and woodcarver who laid and built upon the foundation of Federal Salem in its golden age, was born–or at least baptized. Upon this anniversary last year, I featured some of McIntire’s commissions in and around my neighborhood, the McIntire Historic District. This year, I want to focus on an orphaned McIntire mansion on the other side of town (and the tracks, really) in the emerging Bridge Street Neck Historic District. The Thomas March Woodbridge House is the most remote of all the McIntire houses in Salem, built around 1809 or 1810 on the main northern thoroughfare leading in and out of the city, Bridge Street. The house served as a single-family residence for more than a century, and in 1939 it came under the stewardship of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (now Historic New England), primarily to protect the impressive interior woodwork of McIntire, which remains intact even after the long institutional occupancy of the venerable Salem charity, the Children’s Friend and Family Services, from 1955 until about 5 years ago. The Woodbridge House went on the market at that time, and it is still for sale today.

Woodbridge House exteriors from yesterday and a century ago; the Frank Cousins photograph is from the Peabody Essex Museum’s microsite, Samuel McIntire: Carving an American Style.

Despite its obvious magnificence (and really low price), the house is a difficult sell for a couple of reasons, first of which is location, location, location. Bridge Street is a tough street, and probably a tough sell. As a principal entrance corridor for several centuries it developed commercially rather than residentially, creating a streetscape of lots of ugly buildings (but there are some great houses located on the side streets that form the adjacent neighborhoods). With the construction of the new Beverly bridge and bypass road in the past decade, plans and possibilities for a more aesthetic environment have been explored, but it’s going to take a while. The house is large and institutional, and those developers that have been interested in condominium conversion have been put off by the preservation easement overseen by Historic New England. This house needs a really special buyer, one that is primarily motivated by the interior McIntire woodwork.

The “incomparable interior woodwork” of McIntire is certainly recognized by this 1919 advertisement for silk upholstery and drapery fabric. Here the very spirit of this Salem “super-carpenter”seems to be for sale.

6 Comments | tags: advertising, Architecture, Historic Preservation, Samuel McIntire, urban planning | posted in History, Houses

January 12, 2012

Steam Power

By daseger

I’ve been doing some research on Salem manufacturers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for an upcoming fundraising event at the Salem Athenaeum with a steampunk theme (lots more on this later) and am a bit overwhelmed: there were so many. America was certainly a country of makers a century ago; now it seems like we’re mostly sellers. Anyway, since I’m taking the steam in steampunk literally I have found myself focusing on all sort of machinery makers in general and the Locke Regulator Company of Salem in particular. This company, founded by two New Hampshire brothers, Nathaniel and Alpheus Locke, who came down to Salem to make their fortune, grew from a back-of-the-barn operation in the 1870s and 80s to big business after its incorporation in 1902. The large Locke factory, pictured on the first piece of “industrial ephemera” below (from 1910), was located on the banks of the North River in Salem, now the site of a junkyard and a car wash. According to the claims of the last advertisement below, by 1913 the Company was the largest Manufacturers of Steam Vehicle Parts & Fittings in America.

The Company experimented with automobile manufacture in the first decade of the twentieth century (that’s another dynamic industry at this time; it seems like every town or city of a certain size had several small automobile makers within its midst), building a little “runabout” called the Puritan, but I think they must have soon realized that their future was in parts.

a 1902 Puritan steamer from the Early American Automobiles website; Locke shears from the same year.

The Locke Regulator Company appears to have been a family business, both before and after its incorporation and period of dynamic growth. Alpheus retired from the business in the 1890s, but Nathaniel continued on, with his brother-in-law, son, and son-in-law all working for the company at one time or another. Their factory was in North Salem, as were their residences, primarily on or in the vicinity of Dearborn Street, very close to the threatened homestead of another prominent family that I wrote about in my previous post. The Ropes family and the various Lockes were neighbors, and perhaps friends. At the turn of the last century, Nathaniel and his wife Sophronia were living on one side of Dearborn Street, in a “new” house built for them in 1874, while their son Albert was living almost just across the street, in an even newer (and bigger) house built for his family in 1896.

Dearborn Street just before World War One; the Albert N. Locke House yesterday.

13 Comments | tags: advertising, Architecture, Culture, ephemera | posted in History, Salem

December 29, 2011

Numerical New Years

By daseger

I’ve collected a sequence of New Year’s Day cards (+ one poster) from a century ago, when separate New Year’s Day greeting cards were issued by the thousands, both in America and Europe. The collective “Season’s Greetings”/ “Happy Holidays” cards began to dominate the message after World War II, with the consequence that New Year’s now seems to be a mere afterthought of the Christmas celebration. New Year’s Day cards are interesting because they feature an assortment of trans-Atlantic traditions and tropes which are supposed to bring good luck in the next year: pigs are very popular, as are the traditional horseshoes and clovers. There are babies, of course, and the occasional champagne glass or bottle. For some reason, mushrooms appear on a lot of cards, particularly European ones, sometimes with gnomes, sometimes not. I thought I’d feature “year” cards–in chronological order–from the first decade and a-half of the twentieth century, from my own collection and that of the New York Public Library Digital Gallery. First off, cards from Germany and Switzerland, followed by my very favorite card (1904): a lady on a pig against a background of four-leaf clovers, holding a glass of champagne. And mushrooms! How lucky can you get?

“Smoking New Year’s”, evoking the two-faced Janus, by artist and illustrator Frank Graham Cootes (1879-1960).

10 Comments | tags: advertising, ephemera, holidays | posted in Paper

October 26, 2011

Witch City: the Paper Trail

By daseger

Throughout the (almost) year that I’ve been writing this blog, a consistent topic and theme has been Salem’s transformation into “Witch City”, either through private marketing efforts like Daniel Low’s “witch spoons” and Frank Cousins’ branded products and photographs, or through public campaigns like the city’s official schedule of “Haunted Happenings”. We’ve seen it all: from witch creams to witch plates. It seems like an appropriate time to showcase the “Salem Witch” postcards that must have blanketed the nation throughout the twentieth century, even though these postcards are not selling Halloween, they’re selling Salem. As time went on, however, the two things became increasingly connected (and now it seems like they’re inseparable!)

I’m relying on the Salem vintage postcard seller Iconic Postcards for this first postcard because I do not possess it and I think it really encapsulates the early “Witch City” message. It’s not from Germany, but from local publisher W.B. Porter.

The “ye olde” language is utilized in the first of a succession of more standardized witch images, as if to capitalize on both Salem’s colonial and witchcraft associations. And while the language changes over the decades, from the turn of the century to the 1930s, the image remains the same. This is basic branding.

And now from the other direction……… two witches from Germany, including an interesting “stamp witch”, and one published by G.W. Whipple of Salem.

These are the standard “Salem witch” postcards, but of course there were lots of other paper witches in circulation, in the first half of the twentieth century and beyond. Here are some of my favorites, beginning with two “adaptations” forwarded to me by local historian Nelson Dionne. The first pair is the famous painting The Witch of Haarlem by Frans Hals, recast as the “Witch of Salem” (which strikes me as a very brazen move!), while the second shows one of illustrator Frances Brundage’s most famous Halloween cards adapted (rather sloppily) for Salem. Finally we have a rare 1908 German card showing several Salem witches, and a (relatively) recent card marking the worst day (September 22, 1692) in the history of the Salem Witch Trials.

Frans Hals, Malle Babbe, the "Witch of Haarlem", c. 1630

4 Comments | tags: advertising, Culture, ephemera, holidays, Witchcraft | posted in History, Salem

October 24, 2011

German Witches

By daseger

It is very interesting to me that Germany was at the absolute center of the “witch craze” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the creation of a commercial Halloween/witchcraft culture several centuries later. No area experienced more witchcraft trials in the early modern era than the German-speaking lands of central Europe, and no country contributed more to the modern conception of Halloween than Germany. It’s a very Salem-like connection between tragic history and contemporary consumerism.

The most credible estimates for the number of executions for witchcraft between 1450-1750 are in the range of 40,000 to 60,ooo people across Europe, with southern and central regions of Germany accounting for between 17,000 and 26,000 executions, as compared to between 5000-6000 executions for all of France, around 1000 executions for England and Wales, and a mere 50 estimated executions in Spain, where there was little religious diversity to fuel the fires. The intense witch-hunting in Germany, especially between 1580-1630, has led its leading historian to assert that “witchcraft is as ‘German’ as the Hitler phenomenon, and will similarly occupy our attention for a while longer”. (Wolfgang Behringer, Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria: Popular Magic, Religious Zealotry, and Reason of State in Early Modern Europe, 1989 & 1997).

Images of conspiratorial witchcraft in early modern Germany are lurid, much more lurid than the hexentanz (witches’ dance) and hexentanzplatz (witches’ dancing place/floor) postcards issued in huge numbers from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, although there are similar motifs and themes. Below is an illustration of the hexentanzplatz at Trier from a 1594 Flugbatt (“flying pamphlet”) about the massive witch trials in that city (which may have resulted in as many as 1000 executions between 1581 and 1593) and a hexentanzplatz postcard from about 400 years later. As you can see, the earlier image is of an orgy-like witches’ sabbat, while the later image is of an equally fantastic, but much less nefarious, dance.

The other difference between these two images is that the one below refers to an actual place: the Hexentanzplatz is a mountain plateau in the Harz Mountains of north central Germany. Located in modern-day Saxony-Anhalt, it is a site that has long been associated with pre-Christian rituals, along with the nearby Brocken, the highest peak in the mountain range and another supposed sabbat site. As interest in German folklore intensified in the nineteenth century, so too did interest in this region, and it became the site of a mountain-top hotel, an open-air theater, and Walpurgis Night (April 30-May 1) festivities. So this postcard is both an expression of the popular interest in witchcraft as well as a form of advertising. More Hexentanzplatz postcards from the 1890-1930 period are below, some a bit more commercial, some a bit more creative, and all featuring witches.

And here are two images of Brockenhexen, witches flying to Brocken mountain for the Sabbat: the first is a commercial postcard from the 1890s, the second an illustration from an 1878 article in Harper’s Magazine (via the New York Public Library Digital Gallery).

These German witches actually have nothing to do with Halloween; they flew to the mountains on Walpurgis night, the transition between spring and summer. But their images were easily relevant to another pre-Christian seasonal holiday, Halloween, especially given the German dominance of the postcard publishing industry before World War I. In fact, 75% of all postcards disseminated in the United States before 1914 were printed by one of Germany’s 30 postcard manufacturers, either under their own auspices or in collaboration with an American publisher. Americans wanted their witches to be on Halloween postcards, along with other symbols of the holiday, and Germans responded to this demand, generally with images of much less menacing withes than the Brockenhexen. Here are three more witches “made in Germany”, including one flying over a very familiar place.

24 Comments | tags: advertising, Culture, ephemera, Teaching, Witchcraft | posted in History

September 24, 2011

Bewitching Beauty

By daseger

Enough of the Witch Trials, on to Witch City. For the past century or so, rather then obscuring Salem’s association with the trials, the city fathers celebrated it, creating the present-day “Witch City”. I’ve wrote about this development in numerous posts, but the essential beginning can be found here, with Daniel Low’s witch spoon. Shortly after this successful turn-of-the century marketing campaign, other Salem businesses jumped on the witchcraft train, and it really took off. Another example of a nationally-marketed Salem product was the “Witch Cream” manufactured by the C.H. and J. Price Pharmacy of Essex Street.

These advertisements can be found in all sorts of publications in the later 1890s; clearly “Witch Cream” captured the public’s attention. This was a boon period for skin lotions and face creams (often called “vanishing creams” because they melted into the skin, unlike cold creams, which are ancient), following the success of the Pond’s Company and the discovery of new, less-irritating (than lead!) recipes. While early modern women were often criticized for indulging their vanities and layering on too much cream and “paint” (the two women preoccupied with their faces below are clearly vulnerable to the wiles of the Devil), existing recipes for “precious” ointments and waters confirm that they whipped up their own moisturizers. But the late Victorian era, in characteristic fashion, initiated a profitable cosmetics industry.

Daniel Hopfer, Death and the Devil Surprise Two Women (1520 etching, late 17th century print). Collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum

The Price Pharmacy in Salem advertised several products, including “homeopathic tinctures”, a “hygienic wine” (a strengthening tonic for nervous protestation, dyspepsia, etc…), and New England Tooth Drops, but they definitely showcased their Witch Cream, which they sold by mail-order and also distributed to other apothecaries.

I’m not sure what was actually in Witch Cream, although if it’s anything like other contemporary concoctions on the market, it was probably made of cucumber, rose and/or elder flower oils, essences that go way back to the Elizabethan era, and probably beyond. Like so many modern products, it was probably a case of the wizardry of words rather than ingredients.

4 Comments | tags: advertising, ephemera, History, Renaissance, Salem, Witchcraft | posted in History

July 25, 2011

The Beginning of Branding

By daseger

About two-thirds of the way through my summer graduate course on the Expansion of Europe in the early modern era we have already identified three examples of early branding, at least a century before this modern form of advertising is supposed to have been invented. First, we have the logo of the Dutch East India Company, very visible on all Company ships from the early seventeenth century, then we have the brand of piracy, the immediately-recognizable skull-and-crossbones, and last but not least, Josiah Wedgwood’s abolitionist medallion, first appearing in the later eighteenth century in Britain and then crossing the Atlantic to appear in American anti-slavery materials.

One of the world’s first multinational corporations, organized for long-distance trade to the Indian Ocean and beyond, the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC) became the chief importer of Asian goods and wares into Europe in the seventeenth century, opening the doors that Salem ships would sail through two centuries later. The Dutch were the only Europeans that the Japanese would trade with, and their close commercial connection is evidenced by these two items: an eighteenth-century hand-colored woodblock print (with the VOC logo clearly visible on the pale flag in the center) and a late seventeenth-century Arita charger made for the European market (from Christies):

Everyone is familiar with the pirate flag, and I wrote an earlier post on its early history. The flag below, dating from the later eighteenth century, is from the Museum of London’s ongoing exhibition Pirates: the Captain Kidd Story. This logo’s evolution from piracy to poison is another story altogether.

And here is another famous eighteenth-century logo,one of the first political brands and a transatlantic one at that: the pioneering industrialist Josiah Wedgwood’s Am I Not A Man And A Brother medallion, made for the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the 1780s. It became very fashionable and effective in Britain, and crossed the Atlantic after 1800. Below is an original Wedgwood slave medallion from the Victoria & Albert Museum, and a woodcut illustration from John Greenleaf Whittier’s 1837 abolitionist poem Our Countrymen in Chains (Library of Congress).

These examples certainly predate modern advertising, but I think we can go even further back to see the origins of branding, at least to the emergence of printing and printers’ trademarks, or devices, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Unique devices were fashioned by printers as marketing tools in this competitive new industry, and discerning buyers/readers would look for established marks. The dolphin and anchor device of the famous Venetian printer-publisher Aldus Manutius certainly helped to establish his “brand”, but my favorite device is the cat and mouse (rat?) mark of his fellow Italian printer Melchoirre Sessa (fl. 1510-35).

Sources of Devices: “First Impressions” Digital Exhibition at the John Rylands Library of the University of Manchester (Manutius–you can also make your own mark there) and the University of Florida’s Printers’ Devices Database (Sessa).

Leave a comment | tags: abolitionism, advertising, Antiques, Japan, print culture | posted in Design, History

July 8, 2011

George Washington Dined Here

By daseger

Of all the Georgian houses in Salem, the house that reminds me the most of the Lady Pepperell House up in Kittery is the Assembly House, formally known as the Cotting-Smith Assembly House, which has been in the possession of the Peabody Essex Museum since 1965. It’s probably just the pediment and pilasters, because these are two very different houses in two very different settings. The Assembly House was built in 1782 by an unknown architect commissioned by Salem’s Federalist-leaning merchants and shipowners, who financed its construction by selling shares. In the 1790s it was substantially redesigned by Samuel McIntire for its transition to a private residence. And just before that, President George Washington stopped by for a reception in his honor in October of 1789.

President Washington was on a grand tour of New England in the Fall of 1789, and he came to Salem after four days in Boston and a day trip up the North Shore. His general impressions of everywhere he went and everyone he met are all recorded in his diaries, which are easily accessible at the Library of Congress. It is so obvious that Washington was a farmer first and a President second from these diaries: his longest observations are reserved for the landscape and the potential fertility of the soil. He arrives in Salem after a short stop in Marblehead, where he observed that the houses are old—the streets dirty—and the common people not very clean. Salem, by contrast, is deemed a neat Town, said to contain 8 or 9000 Inhabitants. Its exports are chiefly Fish, Lumber & Provisions. They have in the East Indies Trade at this time 13 sale of Vessels. At the Assembly House reception on the evening of October 29, the President observed the attendance of at least an hundred handsome and well dressed ladies.

Nearly ten years after Washington’s visit, McIntire was commissioned to transform the rather plain building into a fashionable residence, and the house was expanded and redesigned and considerable surface detail was added, though the elaborate entrance was added several decades later. I’m not sure when the carriage house out back was added, but it certainly lacks any McIntire-ish detail.

There are some great photographs of the Assembly House from the turn of the last century, as well as some taken by Walker Evans in the 1930s which I showcased in an earlier post. Certainly the popularity of Frank Cousins’ works and those of other national photograph publishers raised the stature of the “Old Assembly House”, as did the whole “Washington Slept Here” movement. As you can see below, the house and its story even served as copy for a 1915 advertisement for (lead) house paint, though the history is wrong: the Marquis de Lafayette dined at the Assembly House 5 years prior to General Washington’s visit, not with him in 1789.

Photographic Sources: Andrew Dickson White Collection of Architectural Photographs at Cornell University Library, The New York Public Library Digital Gallery, the Library of Congress.

2 Comments | tags: advertising, Architecture, George Washington, Samuel McIntire | posted in History, Salem

May 24, 2011

Maps Come Alive

By daseger

In the course of putting together my summer graduate seminar on the expansion of Europe this past weekend I reacquainted myself with some digital map collections on the web. Maps provide an accessible entryway into this topic, in every era of European expansion. The shift from conceptual to more realistic cartography in the early modern era is a very evident and important trend, but early modern mapmakers retained a bit of whimsy when they produced maps in the form of plants, animals and humans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The maps contained in German theology professor Heinrich Bunting’s Travels according to the Scriptures (1581) are very popular with my students and with the blogosphere: the known world as a clover leaf, part of Asia as the flying horse Pegasus, Europe as the classical virgin Europa. This is still very conceptual geography; the clover leaf map is merely a new version of the medieval T-O map, in which the world is inhabited by the descendants of Noah dwelling in Asia, Africa and Europe. Jerusalem is at the center of the world as it has always been. Even though it is almost a century after Columbus, Heinrich’s “world” map only references the eastern hemisphere. His Europa map was stolen from one of the most popular books of the sixteenth century: Sebastian Munster’s Cosmographia, first published in 1544 and issued in many editions by the end of the century. This is what these new, colorful, fantastical maps are all about: competition in the new age of print.

Another Europa: Sebastian Munster’s version from a 1570 edition of Cosmographia:

Another lively early modern map is the “Dutch Lion” map (Leo Belgicus, Leo Hollandicus ) issued in a succession of variations from the late sixteenth century, contemporaneously with the Dutch Revolt against Spain. The rebellious Dutch provinces are shown in the form of a lion, roaring in the face of the powerful Spanish Empire.

"Leo Hollandicus", JC Visscher, 1648

Anthropomorphic and zoomorphic maps continue on into the modern era; they seem to be quite popular in the nineteenth century as a forms of political commentary and expressions of public opinion. These satirical maps are especially prevalent after 1870 and the unification of Germany: French and English versions definitely contain an alarmed awareness of the potential of the new empire to dominate the Continent, as these examples( L’Europe Animale, 1882 and Angling in Dangerous Waters, 1889) from the huge collection of such maps at the University of Amsterdam illustrate:

In L’Europe Animale, Germany is a sly wolf waiting to pounce, while the Angling map personifies the nation with its militaristic ruler, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who is looking over the horizon. The great big Russian bear and Tsar Nicholas are pretty intimidating as well. The end result of all this animosity was of course World War I, and BibliOdyssey has a great post on the jingoistic satirical maps of the Great War here, including the English map “Kill that (German) Eagle” from 1914.

On the lighter side: plates from William Harvey’s Geographical Fun. Being Humourous Outlines of Various Countries, an atlas (presumably for children but quite sophisticated in its humor) first published in 1869. The entire text can be found at the Library of Congress, and it has also been republished. Here, from a very British perspective, are France and Prussia (it’s just before the unification of Germany):

Finally, I can’t resist adding an elephant to this group even though he’s not quite a map: a World Wildlife Fund advertisement by Ogilby and Mather from our own time: