Long before TV commercials, Victorian businesses advertised with small, colorful cards handed out in stores, and families saved them in scrapbooks. Those cards, along with the pretty die-cut scraps people collected beside them, are now favorite pieces of ephemera.
What Are Trade Cards?
Trade cards are small advertising cards, popular in America from about the 1870s to the 1890s. New, affordable color printing called chromolithography made it possible to print bright pictures cheaply, and businesses gave the cards away by the thousands.
- Stock cards had a generic picture, like children, flowers or animals, with a store's name printed on the front or back.
- Custom cards were designed for a product, like thread, soap, coffee, medicine, stoves and farm equipment, often with funny or clever scenes.
- Metamorphic cards had flaps or folds that changed the picture.
- Mechanical cards had moving parts.
What Are Die-Cut Scraps?
Scraps are small, glossy, embossed pictures cut out into shapes like angels, flowers, children, animals, hands and Santa. They were printed in sheets, mostly in Germany, connected by little paper tabs. Victorians pasted them into scrapbooks, decorated cards and screens with them, and used them in crafts.
The Victorian Scrapbook Craze
Collecting trade cards and scraps was a hugely popular pastime, especially for children and young women. Many surviving cards come from scrapbooks, which is why some have glue residue or paper on the back.
What Collectors Look For
- Subjects: advertising for well-known brands, medicine and quack cures, farm equipment, sewing thread, Santa and holidays, Black Americana and political themes are especially collected.
- Bright, clean color and crisp printing.
- Condition: trimmed edges, stains, tears and heavy scrapbook damage lower value.
- Full scrap sheets still connected by tabs are more valuable than single pieces.
Watch for Reproductions
Victorian scraps and trade card images are widely reproduced for crafts. Old scraps are usually embossed with rich, deep color and the gloss sits on the surface. Reproductions are often flat, printed with a dot pattern, on bright white or thicker modern paper.
Caring for Trade Cards and Scraps
- Don't try to soak cards off scrapbook pages; it can ruin them. Often it's best to keep the page whole.
- Store in acid-free sleeves and boxes, away from light and moisture.
Read our beginner's guide to ephemera and our guide to vintage advertising tins.
Did anyone in your family keep a scrapbook? What did they save in it?