Leaves are dropping this November morning, and so are new digital collections. One of our new additions is a small collection of magazines published by the Standard Oil Company (Ohio) for its current and former employees, as well as dealers, distributors, and stockholders. 

Standard Oil Company (Ohio), or Sohio, was created out of the 1911 antitrust dissolution of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company. Prior to the dissolution of the Standard Oil Company, the company's Ohio operations controlled up to twenty-one of Cleveland's twenty-six refineries, while the company as a whole controlled up to 90% of the nation's refining capacity and output.

Hagley Library is making up for lost time during our Digital Archives relaunch, with lots of new items and collections to share. Here's one of them!

This catalog from the Colored Mail Order Corporation of America dates to around 1939. The company was founded in Kansas City, Missouri by Chester Arthur Franklin (1880-1955), a local businessman and the editor and publisher of the Kansas City Call, the city's weekly newspaper covering issues of interest to the city's Black community. The company was Black-owned and operated, and marketed clothes, housewares, and other products to Black consumers across the country.

The company, which promoted itself as being "the largest business of its kind" operated with a mission statement that aimed to persuade its customers that "If you want more jobs for yourselves and your children, if you want greater opportunity for training in business, if you realize that colored people must provide for their own economic growth and security through mutual cooperation ..."

Welcome to the spookiest time of the year, earth mortals! This week, the Hagley Vault is offering the black arts, mesmerism, and witchcraft at a low, low price, courtesy of the ca. 1902 Descriptive Catalogue of Standard Works, Treating on Occultism, Theosophy, Astrology, Mesmerism, Mind-cure, Spiritualism, Psychology, Physiology, Hygiene, Etc.

The catalog was issued by the Prospectors' and Miners' Agency of Palmyra, Pennsylvania. The company, run by Abram Gingrich Stauffer (1862-1928) and his son Oscar (1883-1943), as well as the apparently unrelated Abraham Schopp Stauffer (1887-1951), was a distributor and manufacturer of inexpensive publications, novelties, and various nostrums and elixers. The Stauffers also operated multiple similar companies, including the Electric Motor Company, Gem Novelty Company, Diamond Publishing Company, Franklin Drug Company, Smith Remedy Company, Stauffer and Company, and Hall and Company.