The Hagley Library published collections continue to grow! In 2024, James W. Cortada, a longtime IBM employee and current Senior Research Fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Charles Babbage Institute, graciously donated a wide selection of books and archival materials to Hagley. Since early this summer, I have been cataloguing published works (i.e. books, pamphlets, trade catalogs) from the collection and adding them to our stacks.  

Postcard showing a boy young boy dressed in historical garb with a long gun in a snowy forest, with a rabbit and turkeys nearby.

We're starting off what's going to be a short work-week for Hagley Library staff with this seasonally-themed postcard from the 
Alcan Moss Publishing Company of New York City.

This undated item is part of Hagley Library’s Waldron collection of Christmas and holiday postcards (Accession 2000.223).

This collection of over 500 items was donated to the Hagley Library in 1973 by Maxine Maxson Waldron (1898-1982), an artist and educator once employed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in its department of education, by various private schools as an art teacher, and as a ceramics specialist at the Greenwich House Pottery Shop. After her marriage to William R. Waldron, an employee at Du Pont's Chambers Works, she pursued her interests in art, fashion, and interior decoration through her activities as a collector.

You can view digitized images from this collection by visiting its page in our Digital Archive.
 

The image is a vintage-style book cover titled "Cigarette Tricks" against an orange background with an illustration of a cigarette.

Impress your friends and wow your enemies with a little bit of smoke and mirrors this week (or, well, mostly smoke). 

This new addition to the Hagley Digital Archives is a ca. 1933 pamphlet released by the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. The pamphlet promoted Camel cigarettes with 8 magic tricks, including explanations of the props and procedures involved in each illusion.

The pamphlet was written with the assistance of Paul Carlton, an actual working magician, who also authored the more substantial Magician’s Handy Book Of Cigarette Tricks as well as a series of “It’s Fun to Be Fooled” advertisements for the company that same year. The contract landed Carlton in hot water within his professional circle, as a number of the tricks revealed what were, at the time, secrets of the trade.

Click here to view the pamphlet in full now!

November 1939 cover of The Sohioan magazine, showing an illustration of a service station.

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.

Cover of a catalog from Colored Mail Order Corp. of America with a Black family of four in fashionable clothing.

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 ..."

Subscribe to