An advertising card! What a novel idea!
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Of
course we are speaking about the turn of the century - long before "collectibles"
were items manufactured having no specific value - things to be put aside,
pretty pictures to be pasted into albums, items to be held onto simply
because they looked interesting, "keep-sakes" to be admired
over a period of years.
People have always collected things. No one can put a time or a place
on when the practice of "saving stuff' actually came about. It is
in the very nature of human beings to put things aside to be periodically
reviewed and admired. Some of the earliest 19th Century collectibles included
labels from tea bags, cigar bands, coins, and as the century progressed,
many people would begin stamp collections.
Perhaps the first commercial collectibles produced at the turn of the 20th Century included advertising cards. These were professionally printed "give-away" cards (actually now considered to be the first promotional form of advertising) produced by medicine manufacturers and given to druggists to be offered to their clients who came into their stores. The cards (usually slightly smaller than present-day postcards) usually had an attractive illustration on the front side and then a full written advertisement "selling" the product on the reverse. The first advertising cards were strictly black and white affairs gradually evolving into lovely color printed pieces. Observing the success of the drug store cards, thousands of other product manufacturers soon followed suit and within almost no time at all, cards were being issued to promote tea, motor oil, tobacco products, soft drinks, soaps, and a host of other products - popular at the time.
The public gathered up all of these "free" promotional items and filled volumes of scrapbooks, photo albums, as well as boxes and dresser drawers with a multitude and wide variety of advertising materials. Picture postcards were already the "rage" (the third largest collectible item at the turn of the century) and advertising agencies "jumped on the bandwagon" by introducing other materials in other forms. Shortly into the 1900s, cigarette makers began including pictures of baseball players - in card form - on the backs of cigarette packages as an inducement for people to select their brand over the available others. The most well-known tale about these free baseball cards is the story of Honus Wagner. The Wagner baseball card is probably the most valuable in existence today. Ball player Honus Wagner was an avid anti-smoker and he objected to his image being offered on cigarette packages because he did not want to set a bad example for children - and back in those early days, children were allowed to buy the product and many children did smoke. So, due to Mr. Wagner's insistence, the cards bearing his likeness were recalled in 1909, making the remaining few that had "escaped" very desirable due to scarcity of the particular item.
By
1910, the American Tobacco Company had also begun to put representations
other than sports figures onto its cigarette packs - including a series
called "Flags of All Nations. " These very cards gave "light"
to a new industry and the manufacture of "trading cards" became
a commercial venture. Although primarily the first cards printed (for
almost two decades) were strictly sports cards, they would later on include
a variety of non-sports items into an ever expanding and vast catalogue.
In addition to advertising cards, other collectibles of the time included
a variety of "give-aways" such as pre-printed ink blotters,
small toys, free product postcards, serving trays, glassware, fancy decorated
cookie and biscuit tins, match books, buttons - this list could be endless.
Eventually, the advertising card would be completely discontinued - it would evolve into advertising postcards which would interest a receptive audience. Usually the advertisement (showing the product) would be on the front of the card with a small add on the left-hand side of the card - over in the "correspondence" section. The size of the advertising postcard would either remain standard or would be slightly increased in appearance to become more "outstanding" and, so the thinking was, be more impressive to view than standard-sized cards. Over a period of time, the advertising postcard would also be incorporated onto business envelopes - with fancy illustrations and logos as well as messages written on both sides of the envelope.
What makes our Rockaway Beach advertising card so interesting is that it was dispensed from a beach-side concession about 1915 - and most people visiting the ocean areas were "traveling light" and had nowhere to store paper materials such as this card. Most of these items were either lost on the beach due to moisture and exposure or they were brought back to hotels or rooming houses where they would simply be abandoned at the end of the vacation season. Although it is impossible to apply any general formula to where these cards would eventually end up, it is safe to say that almost all of them would be disposed of within a few days or weeks. The card we display was not for a national brand of product, nor did it have any special value or collectible status at the time it was issued, but obviously someone had a purpose for it because this is one piece of paper which has survived for almost one hundred years - to remind us of a Rockaway Beach in a much happier era.