Descriptive Summary
	Creator:	Landauer, Bella C., 1874-
	Title:	Guide to the Bella C. Landauer Collection of Business and Advertising Ephemera
	Dates:	ca. 1700-present
	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.
	Quantity:	ca. 800,000 items
	Call Phrase:	PR 031

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Biographical Note

Bella Landauer was born Bella Clara Fackenthal in New York in 1874, the only child of a profitable 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.

Sources:

Black, Mary. American Advertising Posters of the Nineteenth Century from the Bella C. Landauer Collection of the New-York Historical Society. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1976.

Landauer, Bella C. "Collecting and Recollecting." New-York Historical Society Quarterly Bulletin. Vol. XLIII, No. 3, July 1959. Pp. 335-349.

Shadwell, Wendy. "Bella C. Landauer Collection of Business and Advertising Art at the New-York Historical Society." in Cameo Cards and Bella C. Landauer. Schoharie, NY: The Ephemera Society of America, 1992.

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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 advised to XX

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Arrangement
	The collection is organized into 7 series:
		Series I. Scrapbooks
		Series II. Ephemera Files (small, medium, large)
		Series III. Sheet Music
		Series IV. Weichsel Tobacco Collection
		Series V. Playing Cards
		Series VI. Speakeasy Cards
		Series VII. Erotic Advertising Cards

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Restrictions

Access Restrictions

Open to qualified researchers.

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

Use Restrictions

Permission to reproduce any Print Room holdings through publication must be obtained from:
Rights and Reproductions
The New-York Historical Society
170 Central Park West
New York, NY 10024
Phone: (212) 873-3400 ext. 270
Fax: (212) 579-8794

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Access Points
	Subject Topics:
		Advertising -- United States
		Asbestos -- United States
		Beverages -- United States
		Cigars
		Clothing and dress -- United States
		Clubs -- New York (State) -- New York
		Cryptography -- United States
		Dance -- United States
		Dry-goods -- United States
		Electricity
		Food --United States
		Patent medicines -- United States
		Penmanship
		Prohibition -- New York (State) -- New York
		Slavery -- United States
		Theater -- United States
		Tobacco -- United States
		Transportation -- United States
		Women -- Suffrage -- United States
	Subject Places:
		New York (N.Y.) -- Description and travel
	Document Types:
		Advertisements
		Billheads
		Bookmarks
		Broadsides
		Calendars
		Cigar box labels
		Cigarette package labels
		Handbills
		Labels (identifying artifacts)
		Lottery tickets
		Posters
		Price lists
		Prints
		Scrapbooks
		Sheet music
		Trade cards

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Administrative Information

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.

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.

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Container List

Series I:
Scope and Content: Once she moved her collection to the New-York Historical Society, Landauer had the Society's bindery create large scrapbooks for her, which she filled with small ephemera, organized by the kind of product being advertised. Within the scrapbooks, there is rarely any further refinement of organization; a researcher looking for a specific business or product may need to consult each of the 4 or 5 scrapbooks compiled on the subject in order to complete an exhaustive search. In some cases, Landauer's own lists (in PR 149) may be of use, but so much of the material has been moved around since Landauer's time that those lists may not be of more help than exhaustively searching. In addition to the scrapbooks she compiled, filled with pasted and taped-in small paper ephemera, Landauer collected scrapbooks that had been compiled by others. These are of various sizes and subjects and are filed at the end of the series, with brief descriptions found in the box and folder list. Some additional scrapbooks of ephemera, acquired by the N-YHS after Landauer's death, have been added to this set. The following is a list of subject headings, under which material is filed. Each topic may have several scrapbooks. Please contact the reference staff at the repository for more information.
Box	Folder	Title	Date
		Advertising
		Agriculture
		Antiques
		Art (including libraries, all museums, and autographs)
		Beverages
		Buildings
		Business
		Clothing (including Ladies, Men's, Millinery, and Shoes)
		Clubs and Societies
		Cotton
		Dances and Balls
		Dry Goods (including Merchants and Textile labels)
		Electricity
		Food
		Furniture
		Hardware (including machinery, metals, mining, safes, locks)
		Hotels and Restaurants
		Household
		Insurance
		Jewelry
		Leather Goods
		Lotteries (arranged by state)
		Military
		Oil
		Optical
		Packaging
		Paper
		Periodicals
		Photography
		Plastics
		Printing and Engraving
		Professions and Occupations
		Publications
		Radium, Uranium, etc.
		Real Estate
		Religion, Philanthropy and Hospitals
		Rubber
		Schools and Colleges
		Seeds and Plants
		Sewing Machines
		Sports, Toys, and Games
		Stationery and Valentines
		Stoves, Furnaces, and Ranges
		Theatrical Enterprises (including Theatre, Motion pictures, Musical instruments, Fairs and expositions, Musicals, Lectures, Radio and television, Dance, Music, Skating)
		Tobacco
		Toilet articles and Beauty aids
		Transportation
		Undertakers, Cemeteries, Coffin makers, Funerals
		United States Government (including Lawyers and Suffrage)
		Warehouses and Waterworks
		Wool
		World War I
		World War II

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Series II: Loose Ephemera

Scope and Content: Loose Ephemera is organized using the same organization system as Series I. Many items in this series were once housed inside the scrapbooks, and were removed for preservation or exhibition reasons. Additional material has been added to these files since Landauer's death; it is no longer easy to know what ephemera items originated in Landauer's own collection. Some items have roman numerals written on the verso in pencil - these numbers correspond to Landauer's original scrapbook numbers and are written in her hand. Other material may have one of several stamps that Landauer used to identify her collection. Within the general scrapbook-based organization, files have been further broken down by type of product, manufacturer, or geographical location where appropriate. This series is organized by size. Smaller ephemera (usually less than 9 x 12 inches) is housed upright in file boxes. "Medium" material (between 9 x 12 inches and 14 x 18 inches) is housed flat in boxes. Even larger material is housed in flat files. The material in the current "medium" size grouping is a combination of material removed from scrapbooks and that previously considered to be "posters." Most of the large size ephemera had previously been called (by Landauer and N-YHS staff) "posters." For ease of access, and to best utilize Landauer's filing system, all loose ephemera (i.e. not pasted in a scrapbook) not found in Series II-VII is housed in this series. Researchers are advised to consult all three sizes of material in search of their topics of interest. Please see the organization schema above, in Series I, to see what topics ephemera is filed into.

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Series III: Sheet Music
Scope and Content: Landauer kept her sheet music separate from other printed ephemera, and it can be found here. This series is arranged by the general subject of the music's cover illustration. There is at this time no way of searching by title or composer. The sheet music is not arranged based on what the song is about. However, some music that does not have a cover illustration is filed under the subject of the song along with those songs with illustrations of the same subject. Subjects generally follow the themes of Landauer's scrapbooks (from which some of this music was removed) but are also taken from other collections of sheet music and from the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials subject headings.
Box	Folder	Title	Date
		ANIMALS
		BEVERAGES
		COMIC STRIP CHARACTERS
		DANCES
		EXPOSITIONS
		FASHIONS
		FIRE
		FLAGS
		FOOD
		GEOGRAPHIC (organized by country, then city)
		LANDSCAPES
		MILITARY
		MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS
		NEWSPAPERS
		PATRIOTIC
		PEOPLE
		PRESIDENTS
		SONGS
		SPORTS
		TECHNOLOGY
		TRANSPORTATION
		WARS

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Series IV: Weichsel Tobacco Collection
Scope and Content: This series is comprised of scrapbooks of tobacco product packaging, including those for cigarettes, cigars, loose tobacco, chewing tobacco, pipe tobacco. Also included are cigar bands, matchbook covers, newspaper clippings, and pieces of correspondence between Weichsel and the various agents from whom he procured either packaging or information about tobacco production and distribution in the various countries. The packaging is largely undated, and though there are pieces from the nineteenth century, most of the pieces appear to be mid-twentieth century, contemporary with Weichsel's collecting in the 1950s. It is currently unclear whether Landauer herself acquired this collection before her death (as she often did) or if it was donated to the Society at a later date. Because of the ambiguity of the historical record, it has been kept within the confines of the Landauer collection. The bulk of the collection is material from international tobacco companies. Consult the repository for a more detailed box and folder listing.
Box	Folder	Title	Date
		Candy Cigarettes
		Cut-Outs
		International tobacco companies
		American tobacco companies

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