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19th Century Advertising Featured People as Vegetables

19th Century advertising featured people as vegetables

Tower Hill, near Worcester, Massachusetts, ranks high on my list of favorite public gardens.

On a recent visit I saw their newest exhibit.

The exhibit featured several trade cards from the nineteenth century garden industry.

In their effort to market vegetable seeds, companies used trade cards that included people as the vegetable.  This trade card from Jerome B. Rice and Company promoted beet seeds. [below]

Jerome B. Rice and Company sold beet seeds with this colorful chromolithograph, copyrighted in 1885.

Notice the phrase beneath the beet-man. It says, “I AM FREQUENTLY MISTAKEN FOR A DEAD BEET.” The lettering appears all in uppercase for greater emphasis.

It was not uncommon for several seed companies to share the same image, changing only the name at the bottom of the card.

The Tower Hill exhibit used this same beet image with another seed company’s name. The name ‘John B. Varick Company of Manchester, New Hampshire,’ appears at the bottom of the card.

Trade Cards

In her book  The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s  cultural historian Ellen Gruber Garvey writes about the history of trade cards.

She says, “Beginning in the 1880s, trade cards dominated advertising for national distributed products, until they were largely supplanted by national magazine advertising during the 1890s.

“Manufacturers had put colorful advertising trade cards into the hands of thousands but nationally circulated magazines were a more efficient tool.”

By the 1890s national magazine advertising had outpaced the effectiveness of the trade card.

At one time these small cards, some with people as vegetables, proved popular both for businesses and customers around the country.

Some people even turned to collecting them as a form of amusement.

The Tower Hill seed trade card exhibit in the library will be up for only a few more days.

 

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