Thank cod, it's #FishFriday! This image shows the back cover of Scott & Bowne's Wonders of the Deep, an 1895 pamphlet about fish created to advertise the company's branded cod liver oil.
This illustration of a man with a fish on his back was a popularly recognized and often used icon for partners Alfred B. Scott and Samuel W. Bowne, who established their pharmaceutical company in New York City in 1873. Scott's Emulsion was the company's flagship product.
The figure appeared on bottles of cod liver oil, trade cards, catalogs, posters, and other advertising. He once appeared several stories tall, painted on the side of a building in Manhattan and the National Museum of American History's collections include a papier mache model.
This pamphlet is Pam 2010.161 in Hagley Library's Carter Litchfield Collection on the History of Fatty Materials (Accession 2413), which has been organized into collections of photographs and ephemera and of manuscripts and archives.
As an organic chemist, Carter Litchfield (1932-2007) studied and specialized in edible fats. Over the course of his career, Litchfield built an important collection about the history of fats and fatty materials. This collection has not been digitized in its entirety. Our Digital Archive offers a curated selection of items from this collection, which primarily includes paper ephemera such as ration stamps, tax stamps, trade cards, pamphlets, and trade catalogs. Click here to view it online now.