This week, we're sharing a 1900 catalog of sales premiums from L.H. Parke & Company for totally normal reasons because everything is fine and great.
L.H. Parke & Company was a wholesale distributor and importer of coffee, teas, spices, and other grocery items. The company was founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1889, when proprietors Louis H. Parke and brothers John M., William P.M., and Samuel F. Irwin joined forces to invest in Samuel's small grocery pushcart business. The company expanded over the decades, but remained a family business for the Irwins; William retired as its president in 1935, handing the company to the next generation of Irwins.
By the time Donald Irwin, Jr. merged the company with Consolidated Foods in 1962, becoming the first president of the newly created Monarch Institutional Foods, the company had grown to become a major institutional wholesale distributor of canned goods, with additional locations in Pittsburgh, Washington D.C., Richmond and Albany, New York.
This catalog advertised the company's Parke's Blue Point Trading Stamps program, a then-popular sales tactic and precursor to modern-day loyalty cards. The program rewarded customers with stamps that, if sufficiently accumulated, could be redeemed for premiums from an allied trading stamp company. The items shown in this catalog were typical premiums of the era; toys, home furnishings, jewelry, and appliances.
To view this catalog online in our Digital Archives, click here to visit its page in our collection of trade catalogs and pamphlets.