This past month the Audiovisual Department added three new collections to the Library that document the history of advertising, shopping, and flying machines.
Hagley has a significant collection of marketing materials that cover the multitude of ways that businesses have advertised to customers. A collection of matchbooks acquired at an auction last month demonstrates a common method of advertising in the 20th century. Advertising on matchbooks can be traced back to the 1890s and persists to this day, but its height came in the middle decades of the 1900s. The collection of matchbooks acquired by Hagley spans the highpoint of this form of ephemeral promotion from the 1940s to the 1960s. The majority of the covers promote products and services in the mid-Atlantic region but the collection spans a wide geographic range within the United States. A finding aid for the matchbook collection available online includes a partial listing of the content in the eight volumes of approximately 3000 items.
Here is a sample page from one of the albums:
Two other collections of note that we added this month:
C.N. Vicary’s Clothing Store Album: The album includes photographs and ephemera from a men’s clothing store in Dayton, Ohio. The photographs depict store exteriors and interiors as well as valuable images of employees dating from the early decades of the 20th century.
N.W. Ayer and Son, Inc. Flying Golf Publicity for the Kellett Aircraft Corporation Booklet: This small collection of newspaper clippings and photographs documents a publicity stunt carried out by the N.W. Ayer & Son advertising agency for the manufacturer Kellett Aircraft Corporation in 1931. Ayer organized a game of golf where a player flew between each of his shots in a Kellet autogiro (a flying machine similar to a helicopter). Ayer and Kellet were both Philadelphia-based firms.
If you would like to view these collections, the library is open Monday through Friday from 8:30 to 4:30. If you have questions, please contact us at askhagley@hagley.org.
Kevin Martin is the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Audiovisual & Digital Collections at Hagley.