A
Brief History of Trade Cards by Ben
Crane Over
a century ago, during the Victorian era, one of the favorite
pastimes was collecting small, illustrated advertising cards
that we now call trade cards. These trade cards evolved from
cards of the late 1700s used by tradesmen to advertise their
services. Although examples from the early 1800s exist, it
was not until the spread of color lithography in the 1870s
that trade cards became plentiful. By the 1880s, trade cards
had become a major way of advertising America's products and
services, and a trip to the store usually brought back some
of these attractive, brightly colored cards to be pasted
into a scrapbook--as the children are doing in the Chase's
Liquid Glue trade card shown here. Some of the products most
heavily advertised by trade cards were in the categories of:
medicine,
food,
tobacco,
clothing,
household,
sewing,
stoves,
and farm. The popularity of trade
cards peaked around 1890, and then almost completely faded
by the early 1900s when other forms of advertising in color,
such as magazines, became more cost effective. Although trade card
collecting began over 100 years ago, today's strong interest
in trade cards began relatively recently. Trade cards that
were bought for ten cents thirty years ago frequently bring
ten dollars or more in today's market--and some have even
sold for over a thousand dollars.
