Trade cards, a popular advertising medium passed on to
shoppers by retailers in the 1870s through the 1890s, are a common ephemeral
material found in the California Historical Society collections, but rarely do
we see a trade card serial. In the above series a rough and tumble fight
between two tom cats for the affections of a delightfully accessorized feline
ends with the orange and black tabby broken and battered but his confidence
fully intact.
While arranging materials in our California business ephemera
collection I first located numbers 1, 5, and 6 of this series in the file for
F.H. Atwater, a store in Petaluma that sold a wide variety of goods. Sadly, I
could only imagine what sort of ferocity was inflicted upon this smitten tabby
by his romantic rival in the missing cards 2, 3 and 4. My curiosity was not
appeased until I came upon the file for Hale Brothers & Company, a
department store chain, also with a store in Petaluma, which included the cards
2, 3, and 4 from this series. Whether the serial is an early example of a
partnership between the stores to cross-market or just a delightful coincidence
where one collection filled the gaps of another, it is an example of the many
surprises we come across in the CHS collections.
Jaime Henderson,
Archivist
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