Category: Trade Cards

  • Chocolate Premiums

    In the late 19th-century, when you bought chocolate, the grocer dropped a delightful prize into your bag, a trade card to save and share. The Chocolat Pupier brand was created in Saint-Étienne, France, in the 1860s. The founder, Jean-Louis Pupier, handed over the company to his son Joseph in 1895. His grandsons Adrien and Marcel…

  • Trade Cards – Famous Lithographers

    Thomas Calvert, born in Yorkshire (1828) and immigrated to America when he was 21. He worked for several printing companies before moving to Detroit and starting his own firm in 1861. Calvert was a major producer of trade cards from the late 1870’2 to 1900. Thomas Calvert became one of the leaders of the American…

  • Stock Trade Cards

    By the mid-1870s multicolor trade cards had fully emerged as a popular form of advertising for a wide variety of manufacturers and retail establishments, stimulating a vigorous, competitive business for the printing industry. Advertisers could overprint their promotional information in spaces on the front or have it stamped on the reverse. Some stock trade cards…