Here is an elaborately illustrated Victorian trade card for bookseller Samuel J.W. Reynolds (or S.J.W. Reynolds) of Cooperstown, New York.

I stumbled across it in my collection today and remembered blogging about it years ago—15 as it turns out. I thought I’d lost it! It’s one of my favorite items and deserves an upgrade in both the writing and imaging departments. I don’t recall having a scanner at the time and did the best I could with a cheap digital camera for the images.

The die-cut card conveys an image, rich in colorful, busy detail, appropriately in the shape of a book. The binding of that book provides the business vitals, while the cover invokes an imaginative scene of mischievous elves at play while the owner's away. Actually, he's just returned and caught them in the act. See him in the upper-right corner of the card peering in from the doorway behind a slightly opened door.

There is actually a method to the madness of the chaotic scene as it provides additional advertising of products Reynolds offers for sale in his shops—writing instruments, ink, periodicals, and assorted categories of books.

The card dates to the 1880s or possibly 1890s. Reynolds’ book shop was busy publishing Phinney's Calendar, or Western Almanac, in the mid-1880s, which is the earliest reference I can find for his shop being open.  In an 1890 volume of Publisher's Weekly, a sales ad is found for Reynolds' bound collection of a full run of Century Magazine and also a Cooperstown map that lists his business. He appears to have moved on from the bookselling business around the turn of the century.

While the illustrator of this card is anonymous and likely lost to time, the printer is not. This chromolithograph was produced by Mayer, Merkel & Ottmann Lith. N.Y., as credited along the bottom border. Founded in New York in 1869 by Vincent Mayer and August Merkel, the firm added Jacob Ottmann in 1874. By the 1880s, they had grown into one of the largest and most highly regarded trade card and color lithography producers in the United States. And about that time, this card caught the eye of a Cooperstown bookseller. Its illustration, unlike the artist, is not forgotten.


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