Believe it or not, the life of an archivist isn't always glamorous. When we're not discovering long-lost folios that change everything, retrieving and/or stealing the Constitution, or removing our glasses to reveal that we've been beautiful this whole time, we're often doing something boring, like generating rows and rows of metadata for old scanned pdfs that someone forgot to (or never bothered to) create metadata for at the time they were scanned. And sometimes that neglectful jerk was us (this whole time)!
Fortunately, there's little lights in that darkness, like these "gay brownies" frolicking in the moonlight for the Stover Bicycle Manufacturing Company of Freeport, Illinois. I want to go party with these guys. They know what's up.
To see more of this 1894 catalog, check back soon to Hagley Library's trade catalogs and pamphlets collection in our Digital Archive. This growing digital resource contains selections from our collection of trade catalogs and pamphlets. The materials date from 1783 to 1988 and vary in size. The trade catalogs contain lists, often illustrated, of items sold by an assortment of manufacturers, mostly American. The pamphlets largely consist of promotional materials.