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Bella C. Landauer Collection of Business and Advertising Ephemera

Call Number

PR 31

Date

1700-1990, inclusive

Creator

Extent

150.00 Linear feet (ca. 800,000 items)

Language of Materials

The description is in English.

Abstract

Collection of mainly 19th and 20th century advertising ephemera. Formats in the collection include American trade cards, lottery tickets, handbills, labels, broadsides, calendars, billheads, price lists, advertising fans, and other materials of history and popular culture. Media range from rough woodcuts to chromolithographs.

Biographical Note

Bella Landauer was born Bella Clara Fackenthal in New York in 1874, the only child of a prosperous corset manufacturer. She attended classes at Miss Hewitt's, and became proficient in several foreign languages. Her father disapproved of college for women, so Bella educated herself with her inquiring mind and interest in many different subjects, including opera and theater. In 1900 she married Ian Nathan Landauer, a fabric importer and salesman, and a first-generation immigrant from Germany. The Landauers' sons were born in 1902 and 1906, and Bella devoted her intense energy to the task wife and motherhood. During World War I Mrs. Landauer volunteered for the New York chapter of the American Volunteer Field Service, which took a toll on her health. A doctor ordered her to rest, and Landauer looked to find more suitable activities for herself.

Bella Landauer first began collecting ephemera in 1923, when she bought a portfolio of bookplates and other prints for one hundred dollars. Though that portfolio was later revealed to have been stolen from a dealer, Landauer was permanently hooked on the idea of collecting printed ephemera. She first embarked on a quest to discover and acquire new bookplates. The next year she added tradecards. Subsequently, as she encountered new genres of material, her interests expanded and her collections grew. She traveled to Europe in search of ephemera, and began to create special collections on specific advertising themes.

In 1926, when Landauer moved from her brownstone at 11 West 74th Street into an apartment in the Drake Hotel, she no longer had space to house her already quite large collection of ephemera. She offered part of her collection to the New-York Historical Society, initially presenting a group of trade cards and bookplates, but never stopped adding to and expanding the collection. Landauer was first given a former kitchen in which to store and organize her collections. However, when the Society's building was expanded in the late 1930s, a special room was created on the third floor to house the Landauer Collection.

Landauer was made an Honorary Curator of the collection but was never on the Society's payroll. She spent hours at the Society organizing her various materials, and members of the public were invited to view them on Sunday afternoons. Landauer continued to collect and donate items, including lottery tickets, posters, sheet music, cameo cards, and matchbooks, until her death in 1960. Her son James D. Landauer donated more items to her collections.

Landauer often referred to her collections as "scraps of old paper," but these ephemeral items have proven to be valuable graphic records of their times. The New-York Historical Society's Bella C. Landauer Collection of Business and Advertising Ephemera holds over eight hundred thousand items. Landauer also donated ephemera to many other institutions: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the New York Public Library, Dartmouth College library, Library of Congress, and Baker Library at Harvard University.

In 2001, Landauer's reference materials were separated from the ephemera collection material, and became a separate collection, the Bella C. Landauer Reference and Writings Collection (PR 149.) All three-dimensional items (such as milk cartons, matchbooks, and paperweights) were transferred to the New-York Historical Society's Department of Painting, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts.

Arrangement

The collection is organized into 8 series:

Series:

  1. Series I. Scrapbooks
  2. Series II. Ephemera Files (small, medium, large)
  3. Series III. Sheet Music
  4. Series IV. Weichsel Tobacco Collection
  5. Series V. Photographs and Fine Art Works
  6. Series VI. Playing Cards
  7. Series VII: Speakeasy Cards
  8. Series VIII: World War II Army-Navy "E" Awards Ephemera

Scope and Content Note

The Bella C. Landauer Collection of Business and Advertising Ephemera contains material spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Collection contains an amazing array of advertising ephemera in a variety of formats: posters, trade cards, cigar labels, product labels, printed advertisements, and sheet music, among others. The collection was originally organized by Landauer, as described above, in a variety of ways, most usually by format or by product being advertised.

Landauer's own lists of items by subject can be found in the Bella C. Landauer Reference and Writings Collection (PR 149).

Throughout Series I and II, all ephemera is organized by the product for which it is advertising. This makes searching for specific businesses and industries easy, but searching for examples of specific printers or lithographers more difficult. Researchers are encouraged to contact the Print Room reference staff at printroom@nyhistory.org for assistance.

Access Restrictions

Materials in this collection may be stored offsite. For more information on making arrangements to consult them, please visit www.nyhistory.org/library/visit.

Open to qualified researchers by advance appointment only. To schedule an appointment, contact the Print Room Librarian at printroom@nyhistory.org.

Photocopying undertaken by staff only. Limited to twenty exposures of stable, unbound material per day. See guidelines in Print Room for details.

Use Restrictions

Application to use images from this collection for publication should be made in writing to: Department of Rights and Reproductions, The New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West, New York, NY 10024-5194, rightsandrepro@nyhistory.org. Phone: (212) 873-3400 ext. 282.

Copyrights and other proprietary rights may subsist in individuals and entities other than the New-York Historical Society, in which case the patron is responsible for securing permission from those parties. For fuller information about rights and reproductions from N-YHS visit: https://www.nyhistory.org/about/rights-reproductions

Preferred Citation

This collection should be cited as Bella C. Landauer Collection of Business and Advertising Ephemera, PR 031, Department of Prints, Photographs, and Architectural Collections, The New-York Historical Society.

Location of Materials

Materials in this collection may be stored offsite. For more information on making arrangements to consult them, please visit www.nyhistory.org/library/visit.

Provenance

Gift of Bella C. Landauer between 1926 and 1960, with later additions by her son, James D. Landauer. Other advertising ephemera by a variety of donors, as well as material with no attributed provenance, were added to the collection after Landauer's death.

Related Materials at the New-York Historical Society

Bella C. Landauer Writings and Reference Collection PR 149 contains scrapbooks, indices, monographs, articles, and correspondence which comprise an archive for the Bella C. Landauer Collection of Business and Advertising Ephemera at the New-York Historical Society, as well as for other collections of Landauer's that she deposited at other institutions.

Additional advertisements and ephemera are held in the Ephemera File, PR 264.

Additional materials donated by Bella Landauer are held in the library's general collections and in the museum collections.

Collection processed by

Processed by New-York Historical Society staff

About this Guide

This finding aid was produced using ArchivesSpace on 2023-08-21 15:49:02 -0400.
Language: Description is in English.

Edition of this Guide

This version was derived from landauer.xml

Repository

New-York Historical Society
New-York Historical Society
170 Central Park West
New York, NY 10024