Trade catalogues in the Winterthur Library - Winterthur - Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2002 by Neville Thompson

The Winterthur Library will be fifty years old in 2002. Founded to serve the staff of the muse-urn and the students in the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, it has attracted an increasing number of visiting researchers. It has also been a well-placed vantage point from which to observe the advent of fresh areas of research and popular trends in documentation, which today include turn-of-the-century women's magazines, child-rearing manuals, household advice books, photographs, and trade literature. As interest has grown in the nonelite material culture of the more recent past, so has the library's collection of sources that show us the stuff of everyday life and help to explain how and why we have acquired, cared for, used, and sometimes abused the things around us. Catalogues of consumer goods for sale are among the most compelling of such sources, increasingly mined for information about the goods and chattels of the last two centuries.

The publication in 1960 of Lawrence B. Romaine's Guide to American Trade Catalogues, 1744-1900 was a landmark for scholars who are engaged in documenting the manufactured household goods of the past, as well as for those studying the history of American business and industry. The book was a major factor in making these catalogues better known and more accessible. (1) Romaine's guide was a census of the catalogue holdings of scores of American research libraries (including Winterthur's), arranged by product type. The great majority of these catalogues were issued after 1870, the beginning of an onslaught of mail-order catalogues that has not ceased to this day. Romaine's compilation remains a mainstay for anyone working with this genre. (2)

Trade catalogues in book form first appeared in Britain in the mid-eighteenth century, but because these examples are so different in physical makeup and content, they are often overlooked or misunderstood. Although they are, in fact, the legitimate predecessors of Montgomery Ward and Talbots catalogues, the ways in which they differ from their successors testify to the great changes that took place in the production and distribution of goods from the early nineteenth century onward.

Certain eighteenth-century trade catalogues, particularly those for brass hardware, have been a focus of scholarly attention since at least the early twentieth century. (3) For these catalogues to have come into being when they did, a number of conditions had to coexist. There had to have been a reliable market for the goods advertised, and one extensive enough to offset the financial outlay needed to print and distribute these relatively expensive catalogues. The potential audience would have to have been so far-flung that it would have been impractical for purchasers to visit the manufacturers, and this in turn would have created the need for as precise a representation as possible of the goods in question. There had to have been a reliable distribution service for deliveries, a dependable banking system, and, of course, attractive, affordable goods uniform in quality, answering their catalogue description, and sturdy enough to withstand the rigors of shipping. All these conditions came together in the Engl ish Midlands in the mid-eighteenth century, particularly in Birmingham, where the brass industry was beginning to mass manufacture small-scale domestic hardware of all kinds--candlesticks, furniture fittings, dog collars, clock spandrels, bells, door handles, and coffin hardware.

To reach this growing market (that by this time included customers in the colonies) the metalware manufacturers--or groups of manufacturers, we cannot be sure--commissioned engravings of each object in actual size. To neatly convey the choice of sizes in the case of such items as drawer pulls, the entire range might be lined up on the page in descending order. Typically, these engravings appeared on oblong pages, often unbound or encased in paper boards, and in almost every case lacking a title page and thus the name of the maker and the date of the catalogue (although approximate dates can sometimes be determined by watermarks). These "catalogues" often bear annotated prices in ink and sometimes inscriptions in French, German, or Italian, testifying to the long reach of Birmingham's manufacturers in the race for industrial supremacy (see pl. II). But, as Nicholas Goodison states in his excellent discussion of the Victoria and Albert Museum's collection of these catalogues:

The brassfounders' traditional use of factors and agents accounts for the maddening anonymity of the catalogues. Agents did not want their customers, to whom they showed the patterns, to discover the sources of their wares...we are left with little on which to construct any theories about the origins of these tantalizing patterns. (4)

The hardware engravings themselves often seem to have been collected with the tastes of particular overseas markets in mind, and can contain a mixture of the stodgily old-fashioned and the frivolously up-to-date to please all tastes. It is not uncommon to find the same design repeated in catalogue after catalogue. Looking at the Winterthur Library's notable collection of these catalogues, I am often struck by their elegance, by the excellence of the paper, the care taken by the engraver, and the skill with which the objects are arranged on the page (see P1. VI). The sheets are, in fact, an offshoot of the long tradition of ornament prints known from the Renaissance onward and relate most specifically to those produced by impressing the object itself (usually metal) directly onto the paper. (This maybe the origin of the term pattern book often applied to these catalogues by early collectors.)