A New and Wonderful Invention When making a purchase at the local store in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, shoppers were likely to have small cards advertising products such as "Stimson's Sudsena, A New and Wonderful Invention Making Its Own Magic Suds" slipped into their packages. Brightly colored, with eye-catching illustrations on the front and promotional text on the back, these "trade cards" were produced by the hundreds of thousands and inserted into packages at the factory, handed out by retailers with every sale, or mailed to prospective customers. Industrialization, urbanization, and commercial expansion following the Civil War altered the social and economic landscape in America, contributing to the rapid development of new consumer markets. Manufacturers began to vie aggressively for consumer spending. The trade card, itself a "new and wonderful invention," met the need for an effective national advertising medium, heralding the arrival of an extraordinary variety of manufactured goods newly available to the American public.

Rapid Transit Soap. Colgate & Co., New York. ca. 1885. Chas. Shields' Sons, New York, lithographers.   Willimantic Six Cord Spool Cotton. ca. 1883. Forbes Co., Boston, lithographers.   LePage's Liquid Glue. Russia Cement Co., Gloucester, Mass., ca. 1885. Recto and verso .

As one of the most popular forms of advertising in the nineteenth century and an indicator of consumer habits, social values, and marketing techniques, trade cards are of interest to scholars of business history, American studies, graphic design and printing history, and social and cultural history. Baker Library holds thousands of trade cards representing the full range of products and businesses advertised through this medium from the 1870s to the end of the 1890s. To provide better access to the collection, the Historical Collections Department of Baker Library is now cataloging and digitizing an initial group of 1,000 trade cards that are representative of Baker's collections and of the genre itself. The project is one of the first five projects funded by Harvard University's Library Digital Initiative, an effort by the Harvard University Library to create an infrastructure to support the "collecting" of digital resources at Harvard. Additional funding for the trade card project has come through the generous support of the American Association of Advertising Agencies and Arnold Communications, Inc.