Trade catalogs might include products sold by stores, but those stores also need fixtures to display the products. Some of the catalogs in the Trade Literature Collection illustrate retail display fixtures, like this one from 1894.
Tag: National Museum of American History Library
With such cold temperatures, this might be a good time to stay indoors for an arts and crafts project. In the past, we highlighted a trade catalog related to knitting and crocheting, but this time let’s look at a catalog for artists.
Now that Winter is here and some areas have already seen snow, let’s travel back in time by way of a trade catalog to see what people in the early 20th century might have used for a ride through the snowy countryside.
Along with time, humankind invariably changes the landscape. The geography and a series of events and errors that occurred in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on December 6th, 1917, contributed to the most catastrophic and dramatic man-made violence to a surrounding area and its inhabitants before the Atomic Age. In the annals of disasters of the 20th century, including the Great War, the explosion that occurred at the Canadian harbor was particularly horrifying and cruel. It was if the battles of the Western Front had crossed the Atlantic in a flash and ruined the bustling, prosperous seaport.
Is a new kitchen gadget on your holiday wishlist? How about tools for making ice cream? Let’s look at a 1912 trade catalog illustrating some equipment for making and dispensing ice cream.
Cemeteries use a variety of styles to mark graves. The gravestones might be upright or flat. Sometimes both a headstone and footstone mark the grave or a monument might stand at the spot. If you had walked into a cemetery in the late 19th century, what would you have expected to find? Maybe you would have run into a grave guard.
It’s September and students across the country are now well-settled in their new classrooms, many filled with laptops and high tech, interactive white boards. What would you expect to find in an 1874 schoolroom? This trade catalog from that year shows typical furniture but also illustrates a few more things, like teaching aids. Though a little lower tech than today’s models, some are still quite innovative.