Book Description

Trade catalogs of the long nineteenth century, in the words of the former Curator of Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "vividly picture the epic of muscle, thought, and enterprise which built up our commerce and dominate our history," (Mayor, vii). As many as two million trade catalogs were produced between the nation's founding and the mid-twentieth century (Fredgant, p. 6) and this digital collection assembled from the NMAH Trade Literature collection includes trade catalogs with almost one million pages relating specifically to the basic industries that reshaped the American economy in the nineteenth century. These include iron and steel producers, iron molders and shapers, railroads and railway equipment, agricultural machinery, power generation, building and construction, mining and mining equipment, and motorized vehicles. Many of the catalogs provide a state of the field snapshot of one of these industries at its moment of publication. Often a combination of sophisticated illustration, price lists, education on technological processes, and corporate history, these publications are some of the most important primary sources available for historians of technology, business organization, graphic design, and illustration. Insights into the many decisions about color, type, layout, drawings, reproductions, and bindings that might go into a trade catalog of the period were codified in a manual produced by a salesperson of fine papers, Carl Richard Greer, in The Buckeye Book of Direct Advertising of 1926. During the last half of the nineteenth century, American trade catalogs were printed by the best printers. They were illustrated with woodcuts and lithographs made by some of the best artists and engravers in the country. Their copy was written by "outstanding authors and historians" (Romaine, ix).