Category: Graphic Arts, Business, Harvard University

Historical Collections Exhibit As new consumer markets developed following the Civil War, the advertising trade card met the need for an effective national advertising medium and heralded the arrival of an extraordinary variety of manufactured goods newly available to the American public. An exhibition organized by the Historical Collections Department of Baker Library. Search Catalog records for 1,000 of Baker Library's advertising trade cards, with accompanying digital images, are now available through the Visual Information Access (VIA) system, an online catalog of visual resources at Harvard. Baker Library holds more than 8,000 trade cards representing the full range of products and businesses advertised through this medium from the 1870s through the 1890s.