The Trade Cards Of Old London
November 27, 2018
Is your purse or wallet like mine, bulging with old trade cards? Do you always take a card from people handing them out in the street, just to be friendly? Do you pick up interesting cards in idle moments, intending to look at them later, and find them months afterwards in your pocket and wonder how they got there? So it has been for over three hundred years in London, since the beginning of the seventeenth century when trade cards began to be produced as the first advertising. Here is a selection of cards you might find, rummaging through a drawer in the eighteenth century.
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Nice to see the now forgotten long s in these trade cards, these look like an ‘f’ but without the forward ligature, they went out of use in the nineteenth century, would like to see more of these cards in the future.
Keep up the good work.
Always a fascinating read, and especially so for born and bred Londoners of all ages.
Simply beautiful! The time when business cards told a story.
Greetings from Boston,
GA, interesting collection of London’s old signs from the Bishopgate’s collection. Includes colorful street directions like “over against Middle Row, Holburn,” “within Three Doors of Algate, on the left side of the way,” and “in ye Broad part of St. Martin’s court.” I wonder when street numbering became universal?
I also learned a new word PERUKE- “a man’s wig of the 17th and 18th centuries, usually powdered and gathered at the back of the neck with a ribbon; periwig.”
Beautiful. What size are these cards?
This is an extraordinary peek into another time. Personalities come through in many instances. Thank you!
I especially enjoyed the Misses Hogarth, with the elaborate note on how to find them, and the offer to supply outfits for Bluecoat boys. I expect you know this, but Sir Joseph Banks’s sister, Sarah Sophia, made a large collection of ephemera, which she left to the British Museum – were such collections (of basically valueless – to them! – items) fairly common at the period?
Works of Art, Wonderful.
SENSATIONAL…
THANK YOU