Two Early Advertising Cards

Advertising or trade cards were an extremely popular collectible in the 1880's. Manufacturers distributed them by mail and merchants gave them away at their stores. People pasted them in albums at home along with other decorative scraps of the period. Sometimes printers issued generic cards on which a manufacturer or merchant could put his own imprint, at other times printers designed cards for a specific product and incorporated an image of that product into their design. The card for Fleischman's Yeast is an example of the latter type and the "Woman's Suffrage Stove Polish" of the former. One wonders today if the unintended irony of the name "Woman's Suffrage Stove Polish" was picked up by many at the time.