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When making a purchase at the local store in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, shoppers were likely to have small cards advertising products such as "Stimson's Sudsena, A New and Wonderful Invention Making Its Own Magic Suds" slipped into their package. Brightly colored, with eye-catching illustrations on the front and promotional text on the back, these "trade cards" were produced by the hundreds of thousands and inserted into packages at the factory, handed out by retailers with every sale, or mailed to prospective customers.
Industrialization, urbanization, and commercial expansion following the Civil War altered the social and economic landscape in America, contributing to the rapid development of new consumer markets. Manufacturers began to vie aggressively for consumer spending. The trade card, itself a "new and wonderful invention," met the need for an effective national advertising medium, heralding the arrival of an extraordinary variety of manufactured goods newly available to the American public.
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The Development of the Advertising Trade Card
From the early "tradesmen's cards" of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the "business cards" of the early nineteenth century, advertising materials printed in one color on paper and pasteboard had been used to inform customers about goods and services. As industries developed and communication between regions increased in nineteenth-century America, a greater variety of merchants and manufacturers began to make use of advertising cards. Technological advances in printing and machine manufacture throughout the century resulted in the greater availability of printing presses and lower costs for printing. The development of the lithographic process permitted greater use of illustrations, and the introduction of chromolithography in the mid-nineteenth century led to the extensive use of color in commercial advertising. The 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia provided the first large-scale opportunity for commercial lithographers to display their products, as well as for a wide variety of businesses to hand out advertising cards promoting their goods and services. The popularity of color advertising cards spread rapidly, and by the early 1880s the chromolithographed trade card was being distributed widely by businesses ranging from small shops to large manufacturers.
New Markets, New Methods
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The Art of the Trade Card
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Public Appeal
Chromolithography, a new development in printing technology, allowed for printing in bright and bold colors never before possible in advertising. As some of the first mass-produced color items available, trade cards had tremendous appeal. The public responded with great enthusiasm and collecting trade cards became a craze in the 1880s. Cards were exchanged with friends and collected and pasted into albums. Highly decorative albums were compiled, making use of colorful scraps, trade cards, and other collectible cards. The popularity of the trade card peaked around 1890 and then faded by the end of the century as other forms of advertising, primarily in mass-circulation magazines, replaced the trade card as a means of advertising products nationwide.
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