1900 Victorian Trade Card Mechanical Shoe Shop Au Bon Marche B

Description: This 1900 Victorian Trade Card - Mechanical Shoe Shop " Au Bon Marche" has a picture of a man making shoes. This card can be stood up to give you a 3D effect. The picture has a coo-coo clock, a bird in a cage and shoe working tools on the bench. On the back of the card it says Exposition Univ 1900 Hors Concours Membre du Jury. Measures 2-7/8" W x 5-5/8" H x 1-1/4 D. Brief History of Trade Cards by Ben Crane. Over a century ago, during the Victorian era, one of the favorite pastimes was collecting small, illustrated advertising cards that we now call trade cards. These trade cards evolved from cards of the late 1700s used by tradesmen to advertise their services. Although examples from the early 1800s exist, it was not until the spread of color lithography in the 1870s that trade cards became plentiful.

By the 1880s, trade cards had become a major way of advertising America's products and services, and a trip to the store usually brought back some of these attractive, brightly-colored cards to be pasted into a scrapbook. Some of the products most heavily advertised by trade cards were in the categories of: medicine, food, tobacco, clothing, household, sewing, stoves, and farm. The popularity of trade cards peaked around 1890, and then almost completely faded by the early 1900s when other forms of advertising in color, such as magazines, became more cost effective. Although trade card collecting began over 100 years ago, today's strong interest in trade cards began relatively recently.

Condition: Corners and edges are worn. You can tell, on the back of card, it had been pasted into an album. Check out my other trade cards.

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