Special Collections is pleased to announce our newest digital collection, the John and Jane Adams Trade Card Collection. Trade cards, also known as advertising cards, were wildly popular collectibles in the later half of the nineteenth century as consumer culture took over America. Advertising a huge variety of manufactured goods in bright chromolithography, trade cards were produced by advertisers to encourage recognition of brand names and to stimulate demand for the products advertised. Though trade cards sometimes feature rather generic Victorian images of flowers or birds, these attractive pieces of ephemera often feature comic little vignettes with punchy slogans, or instructions for catchy games to be played using the card. Some are die-cut, and some have folding or moveable pieces--features that surely made great fun for their collectors. Special Collections' Adams Trade Card Collection has examples advertising brand names still recognizable today: Arm & Hammer Soda, Heinz 57 Varieties, and Kellogg's Cornflakes, for example. However, most products in the collection have long been discontinued (for good reason!); Eilert's Extract of Tar and Wild Cherry, Borg's Sure Cure Pepsin and Bismuth Chewing Gum, or the mysteriously named Dr. Price's Locust Buds are examples of patent medicines represented in the collection.
Trade cards can be used to study an incredible variety of social and cultural topics--depictions of women and femininity, domesticity and the American home, advertising methods and consumerism, social mores, race relations, humor--all are made extraordinarily tangible in these fascinating pieces. The Trade Card Digital Collection can be viewed in Luna, along with the University Archives Photograph Collection and the WPA Murals Collection. (Be sure to turn off your pop-up blocker before viewing images in Luna.)
