For sale is a framed Victorian era ACME SOAP TRADE CARD made by the LAUTZ BROTHERS & COMPANY SOAPS, Buffalo, NY. The full color card depicts two children getting water from a well captioned “Be careful Willie, don’t fall!” Trade card measures about 4 1/2″ x 3″. Card is in very good condition with minor dirt smudges. The back side of the card has been taped. The color floral frame measures about 7 inches by 5 1/2 inches. A nice collectible for your vintage decor.
Over a century ago, during the Victorian era, one of the favorite pastimes was collecting small, illustrated advertising cards that we now call trade cards. These trade cards evolved from cards of the late 1700s used by tradesmen to advertise their services. Although examples from the early 1800s exist, it was not until the spread of color lithography in the 1870s that trade cards became plentiful. By the 1880s, trade cards had become a major way of advertising America’s products and services, and a trip to the store usually brought back some of these attractive, brightly-colored cards to be pasted into a scrapbook. Some of the products most heavily advertised by trade cards
were in the categories of: medicine, food, tobacco, clothing, household, sewing, stoves, and farm. The popularity of trade cards peaked around 1890, and then almost completely faded by the early 1900s when other forms of advertising in color, such as magazines, became more cost effective.
