soap advertising – The Posted Past

These three Victorian trade cards were issued in 1882 by J.D. Larkin & Co. of Buffalo, New York, and printed by Cosack & Co., one of the most accomplished chromolithography firms in the country at the time. Two cards advertise Boraxine, a borax-based laundry powder; the third promotes Creme Oatmeal Toilet Soap. Premiums slipped into product packages, these trade cards were designed to be collected.

Though selling soap and cleaning powder, none of the three shows domestic labor. Instead, each presents an aspirational female figure representing a Victorian version of beauty, cleanliness, and high design. The cards are notable for the printing mastery, expensive gilding, and their confident use of Aesthetic Movement and Japonisme design conventions.

Both the Larkin Company and Cosack & Co. went on to significant histories. Buffalo’s industrial power in that era were remarkable, and the craft of chromolithography was at its height. The cards survive as evidence of the Gilded Age and still hold their value a century later.

*Three chromolithograph trade cards, J.D. Larkin & Co. / Cosack & Co., Buffalo, N.Y., 1882*

Chromolithography had transformed commercial advertising in the decade following the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876. The technique required drawing each color separately onto a flat limestone plate, then passing the paper through the press once per color, building the image in successive transparent layers. A finished card of this complexity required a dozen or more passes. The result was a depth and saturation of color that earlier printing processes could not achieve.

Cosack & Co. was among the firms that defined the standard. Founded in Buffalo in 1864 by Hugh Clay and Herman Cosack, the firm described itself as “The Most Complete Lithographic Establishment in the United States” and maintained offices in New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Hartford, and Boston. Buffalo’s position at the intersection of the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal made it a center for manufacturing and commerce. Printing follows industry, and the company produced trade cards, baseball cards, railroad promotions, Civil War memorial prints, and sporting prints.

None of the three cards depicts domestic work. The women shown are not laundering, scrubbing, or cleaning. Victorian soap manufacturers consistently presented their products through images of the comfort and refinement that cleanliness was understood to produce, rather than images of the labor it required. Cleanliness carried significant moral and social weight in this era. Advertising positioned soap not merely as a cleaning agent but as a indicator of respectable domestic life.

Boraxine was Larkin’s second product, introduced shortly after the company’s founding in 1875. Its advertising copy addressed practical concerns obliquely, but the trade cards operated on a different value system. The cards were premium collectibles in the trade card collection craze that preceded postcards. Their purpose was to be kept, collected, and admired as objects themselves.

The collectible strategy belonged to Elbert Hubbard, Larkin’s brother-in-law and advertising partner from 1878 onward. Hubbard recognized that inserting a chromolithograph into a box of laundry powder gave the customer a reason to purchase routinely. The marketing strategy was driven by the collecting impulse and was itself an object that affirmed the class status of buyers.

In 1885, Hubbard formalized this approach into what he called “The Larkin Idea”. Factory direct sales with valuable premiums bundled into combination boxes at the original price of the soap. The strategy transformed Larkin from a regional manufacturer into one of the largest mail-order businesses in the country, eventually employing 4,000 people with annual sales of $28 million. In 1903, Larkin commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design a headquarters building on Seneca Street. It was Wright’s first commercial commission, completed in 1906.

The Victorian trade card era ran from roughly 1876 to the late 1890s, when improvements in magazine color printing reduced the novelty and the format declined. At its peak in the 1880s, trade cards were the most prevalent form of advertising in American commercial life. They were distributed at store counters, tucked into product packages, and carried by traveling salesmen. The collecting culture around them was substantial. Parlor albums were produced specifically to hold them, and publications offered guidance on arrangement and display.

Cosack & Co. continued operating under successive partnerships through the early twentieth century. The Larkin Company closed in the 1940s. Sadly, the Larkin Administration Building was demolished in 1950.

These 1882 cards predate “The Larkin Idea” by three years. The contemporary collecting impulse that Hubbard designed them to provoke also preserved them for more than a century. These three cards survive because they were kept long after the product was gone. They are evidence of a printing firm, a soap company, and a city at a confident moment when quality communication was rightly presumed to outlast its commercial purpose.

To Read More

The Larkin Company — Buffalo Stories Archives offers solid documentation of Larkin’s rise, buffalostories.com

Chromolithography and Trade Cards — The Winterthur Museum holds one of the foremost collections of Victorian trade cards and published research on lithography production, digitalcollections.winterthur.org

The Larkin Administration Building — The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation maintains records of the 1903 building, demolished in 1950, franklloydwright.org

Borax in the 1880s — The Borax/Death Valley history is well documented at the Borax Museum, Furnace Creek, California, nps.gov/deva

“The Larkin Idea” — The Henry Ford Museum blog tells this story, thehenryford.org

Herman T. Koerner and Cosack & Co. — Western New York History is a good source for more, wnyhistory.org

Trade Cards — A Short History at Cornell University, Waxman Collection, rmc.library.cornell.edu

Robert Jay, The Trade Card in Nineteenth-Century America. University of Missouri Press, 1987.

Jay T. Last, The Colour Explosion: Nineteenth-Century American Lithography. Hillcrest Press, 2005.

Rare Cards ~ Seven Victorian Trade Cards Selling Dobbins’ Electric Soap

In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Jacques delivers his monologue in Act II, Scene VII, observing human life with world-weary detachment. He sketches out seven distinct chapters of a human life, from mewling infancy to toothless old age, with equal parts affection and irony. One of the most quoted passages in all of Shakespeare, by the 1880s it was deeply embedded in popular culture — the kind of verse that some households knew by heart.

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

Dobbins’ Electric Soap was manufactured by I. L. Cragin & Co. of Philadelphia and had been on the market since the mid-1860s. By the early 1880s, the company was advertising heavily through trade cards, chromolithographic collectibles that matched the indulgences of the Gilded Age. Cragin’s innovation was to produce not a single card but a series of seven that required the collector to buy a bar of soap each time. Get the certificate from your grocer, and the full set arrived by mail free of charge.

Philly, 1880s. Shakespeare meets laundry.

Front: Each card is a vivid chromolithograph on a warm gold ground with a bold red border, a consistent visual identity that makes the cards a set. The figures are drawn in a coarse comic style, expressive and exaggerated, with each character placed in a domestic or outdoor scene with a bar of Dobbins soap nearby.

First, a round-faced nurse in a white mobcap seated in a rocking chair, holding a squirming naked infant over a washbasin. Card Two shows a sulky schoolboy in a red jacket and yellow-green plaid knickerbockers, satchel over one shoulder. The lover on Card Three is a lanky figure in a gold waistcoat and plaid trousers, leaning against a bureau in a disheveled bedroom.

The soldier on Card Four is wild-haired and red-faced, bent over a green barrel-tub in his uniform trousers and braces, and a sword against the wall behind him. Card Five presents a rotund man in a blue coat, leaning back in his chair with the serene self-satisfaction of someone accustomed to receiving gifts. Card Six is an elderly Harlequin figure in a polka-dotted costume with red stockings, tumbling in mid-air. The final card is a woman in a yellow apron leaning over a green wooden tub, and a billowing human figure made entirely of suds.

Reverse: Black text on cream stock with the full Shakespeare speech across all seven cards, each picking up the verse where the last left off. The final card identifies the source: As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII.

Below the verse, each card runs a version of the same offer in slightly varied language: collect a grocer’s certificate for each bar purchased and mail seven of them to 116 South 4th Street, Philadelphia. Without the certificate, the price for the set is 25 cents.

Each card presents a few product features: no wash boiler, no rubbing board, no house full of steam. Card Four warns against unscrupulous imitations and instructs buyers to ask for Dobbins’ Electric Soap by name. The printer’s imprint for Chas. Shields’ Sons, 20 & 22 Gold Street, New York appears at the foot of each reverse.

Production: These high-quality commercial chromolithographs likely date to the early 1880s, after the business had been in operation for more than a decade. The color registration is precise throughout, the figure work confident and expressive, and the gold-and-red palette gives the set a unified identity that still reads as a coherent series. The illustration style and rich production values mirror the opulent aspirations of the era.

Collectibility: Complete sets of themed trade card series are uncommon; most were distributed individually and rarely survived intact. The Shakespeare framework, the quality of the printing, and the conceptual ambition of the campaign make this set particularly distinctive. It appeals to trade card collectors, Victorian advertising historians, Shakespeare enthusiasts, and ephemera collectors with a taste for the literary and the delightfully absurd.