January 2011

On August 12 last, the editors of AMERICAN HERITAGE sustained a deeply felt loss with the passing of Harry Shaw Newman, a member of our Editorial Advisory Board.

Mr. Newman, known to some as the “Prince of Prints” and to others as “Mr. Americana,” entered into his lifelong work when he discovered in the attic of his grandmother’s old boarding-house in Ocean Grove, New Jersey, two large-folio Currier & Ives prints. He promptly took them to a local antique shop and sold them at what he thought to be a very good price. Rising to the bait, he abandoned his previous job and became a “runner”—one who works out of his car buying and selling antiques.

American manufacturers had a problem in the 1870s. They were beginning to produce and distribute consumer goods on a nationwide scale—but there was no advertising medium of truly national circulation. Their need, together with the perfecting of inexpensive methods of color lithography, gave birth to a fascinating phenomenon, at once folk art and effective business device: the trade card. Inserted in packages at the factory, handed out by retailers with every sale, or mailed to prospective customers, these small cards touted the virtues of almost every imaginable product. The complete sales pitch was usually printed on the back, but an attractive colored picture on the other side of the card was invariably the attention-getter—one that soon proved its tremendous appeal. Thousands of Americans avidly saved these cards, later to exchange them with friends, paste them in albums, or just keep them in a drawer in the parlor, where members of the family could beguile a long winter evening by poring over the collection.

The dawn seemed reluctant to break through the dismal skies over middle Tennessee on November 27, 1863, and by ten o’clock the gray clouds had given way to rain. The drops fell on soldiers of the 81st Ohio Infantry drawn up around a gallows on Seminary Ridge, just outside the town of Pulaski, and on a slender youngster in gray seated on a coffin in an army wagon that rumbled toward the hollow square of troops.