Guide to the Bella C. Landauer Collection of Business and Advertising Ephemera
ca. 1700-present
PR 031
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Descriptive Summary
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Creator: |
Landauer, Bella C., 1874- |
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Title: |
Guide to the Bella C. Landauer Collection of Business and Advertising Ephemera
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Dates: |
ca. 1700-present |
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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.
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Quantity: |
ca. 800,000 items |
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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:
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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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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
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Series I:
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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.
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Folder |
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Title |
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Advertising |
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Agriculture |
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Antiques |
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Art (including libraries, all museums, and autographs) |
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Beverages |
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Buildings |
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Business |
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Clothing (including Ladies, Men's, Millinery, and Shoes) |
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Clubs and Societies |
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Cotton |
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Dances and Balls |
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Dry Goods (including Merchants and Textile labels) |
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Electricity |
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Food |
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Furniture |
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Hardware (including machinery, metals, mining, safes, locks) |
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Hotels and Restaurants |
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Household |
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Insurance |
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Jewelry |
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Leather Goods |
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Lotteries (arranged by state) |
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Military |
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Oil |
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Optical |
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Packaging |
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Paper |
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Periodicals |
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Photography |
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Plastics |
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Printing and Engraving |
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Professions and Occupations |
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Publications |
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Radium, Uranium, etc. |
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Real Estate |
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Religion, Philanthropy and Hospitals |
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Rubber |
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Schools and Colleges |
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Seeds and Plants |
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Sewing Machines |
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Sports, Toys, and Games |
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Stationery and Valentines |
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Stoves, Furnaces, and Ranges |
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Theatrical Enterprises (including Theatre, Motion pictures, Musical instruments, Fairs and expositions, Musicals, Lectures,
Radio and television, Dance, Music, Skating) |
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Tobacco |
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Toilet articles and Beauty aids |
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Transportation |
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Undertakers, Cemeteries, Coffin makers, Funerals |
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United States Government (including Lawyers and Suffrage) |
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Warehouses and Waterworks |
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Wool |
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World War I |
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World War II |
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Series II: Loose Ephemera
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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
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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.
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Title |
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ANIMALS |
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BEVERAGES |
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COMIC STRIP CHARACTERS |
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DANCES |
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EXPOSITIONS |
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FASHIONS |
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FIRE |
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FLAGS |
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FOOD |
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GEOGRAPHIC (organized by country, then city) |
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LANDSCAPES |
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MILITARY |
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MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS |
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NEWSPAPERS |
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PATRIOTIC |
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PEOPLE |
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PRESIDENTS |
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SONGS |
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SPORTS |
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TECHNOLOGY |
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TRANSPORTATION |
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WARS |
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Series IV: Weichsel Tobacco Collection
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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.
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Folder |
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Title |
Date |
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Candy Cigarettes |
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Cut-Outs |
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International tobacco companies |
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American tobacco companies |
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