Author: Richard Sheaff

In our modern world of iPods, CDs, internet streaming services, live concerts, NetFlix, 3-D movies, video games and a thousand other ways to be entertained, we rarely stop to realize how very different the world was in centuries past. Back in the proverbial day, infinitely less entertainment was to be found; often, if folks wanted entertainment, they made it themselves.

I give you The Garvie & Wood Patent Musical Sewing Machine Cover. As this woodcut from a 19th-century trade card makes clear, a device could be added onto the top of a treadle sewing machine, such that pumping the cast iron foot treadle would power a perforated paper roll through a device that would output music. Note the perforated paper roll banner at the bottom. Mom pumps and the kids can dance.

The firm of Garnie & Wood was located at 12 Union Square in NYC. They exhibited this product at the American Institute Fair, held annually in New York.

Theirs was not the only such device, known as a dulciphone, or an organette. The Monroe Organ Reed Company produced the 14-note musical sewing machine cover below (Lot 81in the August 2013 sale of Aspire Auctions).

Here is a video of this machine in action:

A sewing machine piece of sheet music, The Battle of the Sewing Machines, can be found in the collection of the Library of Congress (I wonder if one could buy a roll of this particular tune to, in fact, play on a sewing machine?) . . .

Nowadays, for those with a nostalgic bent, the irrepressible Chinese offer a music box in the form of an old-timey treadle sewing machine, which somehow seems to bring things full-circle . . .

Signs on the walls of buildings are by definition ephemeral. Some may last but days, some may last decades, some may linger for a century or more, some from antiquity even remain readable after thousands of years. But eventually, each and everyone will succumb to the vicissitudes of time.

Old and fading advertising images painted on exterior building walls are known as “ghost signs”. The only way to collect them—to document them—is with a camera, and there are those who do just that. A friend from my Arizona days (and also my ophthalmologist there, a collector of antique Native American pottery, and a passionate fan of the St, Louis Baseball Cardinals), Denny Cooper, is an exceptionally talented photographer. One of his photographic activities is shooting images that document ghost signs (most, but not all) in the St. Louis area.

Ephemera Ghost Signs

Here are a few of them . . .

Denny also has come upon some interesting vintage tile advertising on a building exterior . . .

. . . and Denny also takes shots of interesting modern urban graffiti, for example . . .

In the same folder I have been keeping a few other such ghost sign images, which I think are by others but, alas, I seem to have lost the proper attributions. Anyone interested can likely track them down (along with many other ghost signs) on the internet . . .

Over the years I’ve captured a few of these myself (the first one, with its parking space name sign, is a bit of a pun (“rush hour”, get it?) . . .

This one shows a shared building wall on three interior levels, during razing of a seedy area to make way for some government building in Boston; the top floor wall—and perhaps one or two of the others—was part of a strip club . . .

I have long loved to find and capture related images, all to having to do with the passage of time, the ephemeral nature of eroding cultural objects . . .

I recently won a steel engraving proof on eBay, one of the thousands of engraving proofs that have been out there for several years now following the sell-off of the archives of the American Bank Note Company (ABN). A premier securities printer since the mid-1800s (including the printing of many classic US postage stamps), the mid-1900s owners of the firm attempted to profitably market some of the spectacular examples of steel engraved masterpieces held in the archive configured into various modern “collectible” products, over several years, to no avail. Wonderful as the material was (and is), they could come up with no way to sell these old engravings in new formats to contemporary buyers. The world, it seems, had moved on. And so the material was put on the auction block in a series of sales and scattered to the four winds. Bits and pieces of it still pop up on eBay, on other online sites, in stamp and ephemera dealer stocks and in all sorts of other odd places.

So I bought one of these items, listed by a frequent seller of such ABN remnants as “Art Work” from the archive. From the somewhat unclear image, I could not tell if it was perhaps original artwork, a painting created to guide the engravers (which was unlikely) or a black and white steel engraving which had been later “colorized” with washes of watercolor (which was more likely). In any case, it was an attractive, large (4? x 6? image area) vignette, a woman sitting on bales of cotton holding a balance scale with a bolt of cloth on one side and gold coins on the other; for the modest selling price, it seemed well worth having.

When I received the item, I discovered it to be a highly unusual example of a rarely used security printing process. I had never seen an example. It is not original reference art, but neither is the color in the piece the result of any wash of paint; rather, each of the many colors was individually printed in register by ABN, line by line. Throughout, colors overprint other colors, which required multiple passes. I have begun looking into the process, which I still do not fully understand, primarily because details of the proprietary process have been a closely-held company secret. But I have begun to learn some things.

I spoke with Ephemera Society member and security engraving expert Mark Tomasko, and subsequently slipped his excellent book The Feel of Steel (2009 by Bird and Bull Press, and 2012 by The American Numismatic Society) from my library shelf.

Mark shares the information that this highly unusual ABN printing process was referred to as “Major Tint”, developed by ABN in the 1920s, named after two employees (Alfred S. Major and his brother Walter Major). It was used almost exclusively on foreign banknotes (mostly in Latin America) rather than on security documents such as stock shares.

Going back to my library shelves, I find that in the 1959 book The Story of The American Bank Note Company, the official company history by William H. Griffiths, the “Major Tint” process is discussed in general terms:

“This process has remained unique . . . although . . . there have been numerous attempts throughout the printing industry to perfect similar systems.” “Since the process is not in general use, there does not exist any common name for it. It is a form of surface printing, using an intermediary cylinder as in offset lithography, but in other features, it differs materially from that process. The work it produces exhibits distinctive characteristics: first, a large number of different colors may be used; second, the registration of the various colors is precise beyond all comparison; third, the quality of printing is uniform over long runs.” ” . . . when a Major Tint is combined with fine engraving, [a] counterfeiter is given a frustrating problem, no matter what lenses and filters he possesses. For in the Major Tint there may be colors that are so nearly alike or so intermingled that filters cannot separate them. Lines may cross so cleanly that a camera film cannot reproduce the sharpness of the junction. The color of a line may change gradually along its length. Finally, the color or shade of a line may change across its breadth, because the virtually perfect registration of the press makes it possible to print a hairline over one side of a slightly wider line.”

My example, which seems clearly to be an earlier 19th-century piece of work (ABN die #V44820) which was used to explore the new process, was carefully printed on a proof press. Most areas done in black (skirt, hair, facial details) were indeed steel engraved. Virtually all the rest of the image, however, in at least five colors (blue, yellow, red, purple, black) are not steel engraved. They were printed by what Mark describes as “offset letterpress”, in close registration. Other sources have labeled the process “indirect low relief” printing. Individually, of course, offset and letterpress are two distinctly different processes. Offset printing is “planographic” (flat) printing, in which an image is offset onto a (often rubber) blanket from a plate, then onto the paper. Letterpress is generally printed from type/images standing tall at “type high”, inked, then pressed into the paper. I am still trying to piece together the details of this hybrid “offset letterpress”, but it seems that perhaps letterpress elements were first offset onto a blanket and then onto the paper. There was also a printing process used elsewhere dubbed “indirect letterpress” where the letterpress elements were pressed into the back of the paper rather than onto the front. Perhaps this is relevant here. Or not.

ABN went as far as developing a new printing press capable of doing this sort of printing on a commercial scale, though how much it was actually used is unclear. ABN log pages show occasional “Major Tint” notations on foreign banknote production from the 1920s through the 1950s.

In any event, a very interesting and unusual process.

While on the subjects of steel engraving, American Bank Note and the unusual, check out this vinyl record album cover for the jazz / pop /rock band CHICAGO. On this 1973 album, CHICAGO’s fifth, the front cover is totally steel engraved! Unusual, to say the least. It was done by ABN using various 19th-century elements from its archive . . . acathus leaves, Rose engine lathework, border elements, etc. ABN also did the inner album sleeve (offset printed) and included on it a vignette of a 1850s train, previously only known in partial form on a Fourth Issue United States 10¢ Fractional note (paper currency used during the Civil War when metal coins became in short supply; used only between August 21,1862 and February 15, 1876).

Happy Turkey Day!

From the earliest days of our nation throughout the 19th century and beyond, barter has been a way of life in many times and places, generally when cash money was in short supply. Money was indeed in short supply at many times throughout those decades for a variety of reasons at different times . . . remote locations, hyperinflation, scarcity of paying jobs, periods of economic/financial crisis and the like. Direct trading of goods, that “double coincidence of wants”, this-for-that, remains an everyday occurrence throughout the “Third World” today. Wherever there is insufficient cash available, people will swap what they have for what they need. Yet looking to primary source everyday vintage ephemera, I have found that specific references to this very widespread process are surprisingly scarce. A few examples are shown below, and I encourage readers having additional examples to share them!

This 1822 receipt indicated that the majority of the charge for a pair of gravestones was paid “by 4 pork legs weighing 99 lbs” . . .

This Connecticut dry goods dealer encouraged announced that the produce of area farmers would be welcomed in exchange for goods . . .

This grocery store was seeking baskets of eggs as payment . . .

An NH oil lamp store was willing to swap its goods for groceries and produce . . .

I also have somewhere (cannot lay my hands on it at the moment) a billhead receipt with the notation that the purchases made were granted “Credit by Lumber”, wood in exchange for whatever was purchased. When I track it down, I will add it to this post.

(BTW, for anyone interested, I frequently add new “finds” to older posts here on the Ephemera Society website, so it might be worthwhile to re-browse once in a while. I am about to add something to an older post about Soapine whale cards in a few moments today.)

Back when America was largely an agricultural nation, folks were accustomed to personally processing their crops and their animals into food for the table. As the 19th century moved along and industrialization increasingly created manufactured tools and equipment, farm machinery became a major sector of the economy. With the development of chromolithography, trade cards and other color advertisements flooded the country. Many of these were targeted to farmers.

For some reason, trade card makers seemed to have a particular fondness for using anthropomorphic pigs in their visuals. I suppose that, for one thing, pigs are inherently a bit comical, likable. And they are quite intelligent, a fact not lost on those who lived in proximity to these snorters. Producers of ham often featured comical cartoon pigs; the beginning, perhaps, of making meat neatly packaged at the grocery store an abstraction removed from the necessary slaughter of living creatures?

The “agricultural furnace” or “farmers’ boiler” was a specialized cast iron stove useful in many ways on the farm. Fueled by either coal or wood, these stoves could be used inside or outside, to cook animal feed (like corn or soybeans), scald the bristles off off pigs after slaughter, boil water, cure meat, steam food, make maple syrup and help with various other farm activities.

One manufacturer of such agricultural furnaces who issued numerous trade cards was J. S. & M. Peckham of Utica, NY. Peckham’s promotional materials state that their furnace/boiler was a useful appliance for “butchers, farmers, cheese-makers, stock raisers, hotel-keepers, bakers, brewers, chemists, druggists, dyers, painters, laundries, chandlers and for various other manufacturing and mechanical purposes”.

Peckham was also one of the many companies that featured anthropomorphic pigs, apparently cannibalistic, in this case. What swine!

Here is an original Peckham stove recently offered on e Bay . . .

Such stoves were made in a wide variety of configurations, round, oval and rectangular . . .

For those interested in an in-depth look at this subject, I recommend a posting by Howell Harris on the stove history blog, at:

http://stovehistory.blogspot.com/2014/01/jordan-motts-great-hog-boiling-success.html

I am regularly amazed at the reckless abandon of so much Victorian imagery. In an era that has somehow became labeled as staid, convention-bound and repressed, ephemeral evidence often testifies otherwise.

Here is an engraved image, in full Aesthetic Movement style, of a hippogriff, a mythological beast which nowadays appears in the Harry Potter tales . . .

Rather than repression, Victorians often demonstrated vivid and imaginative flights of fancy (which is the origin of Victoria’s Secret brand). Here are a handful of examples . . .

This Deering trade card looks at a glance like a typical period “ad” for a piece of agricultural equipment, but a closer look reveals it is a tongue-in-cheek fantasy machine that takes in grain in the front end and delivers finished loaves of freshly baked bread at the rear . . .

Victorians were a century or so ahead of Andy Warhol . . .

Perhaps the most spectacular exhibit at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago was the truly giant replica of a cast-iron stove at the Michigan Stove Company booth, in the Manufactures Building. Constructed and sculpted of painted oak, the huge stove had room underneath to display many real iron stoves, room enough for visitors to walk through. The mammoth 25 x 30 x 20 foot “Garland” model weighed fifteen tons. It was described as “The World’s Largest Stove”. The Michigan Stove Company was one of eighty stove manufacturers who exhibited at the fair.

Strangely, this giant stove traveled a fair amount and existed almost to this day. The Michigan Stove Company moved it back to their Detroit (“Stove City”) headquarters, luckily not long before the WCE’s Manufacturers Building burned down in 1894. It was erected in front of the building. That headquarters building burned down in 1907 but the big stove survived and was moved to a different location. (That new location was in an area of Detroit known as “Bloody Run”, site of a major 1763 battle between the British and Chief Pontiac’s warriors.) After corporate changes and mergers, in 1927 the replica was mounted on the roof of the factory. In 1957 it was leased by Schaefer Bakeries for advertising purposes; in 1965 it was put on display at the Michigan State Fairgrounds. Because of deterioration, it was dismantled in 1974 and moved into storage in Detroit’s Fort Wayne Military Museum. In 1998, after a $300,000 fundraising campaign, the State Fair organization had it restored and put back on display at the fairgrounds. The 2000 convention of the Antique Stove Association was held underneath “The Mammoth”.

Alas, on Saturday night August 15, 2011, a thunderstorm lightning strike set it afire, and it was destroyed.

Garland stoves, under one corporate configuration or another, were manufactured up until 1955. Julia Child cooked on one, which was put on display at the Smithsonian Institution in 2001.

As a collecting topic, iron stoves are a rewarding area. There are dozens of interesting trade cards, and all sorts of other material readily found . . .