Boulangerie

1880 · 7799 — Belleville IL: Chas. Merck & Son 1880. Near fine. Trade card printed on linen measuring just shy of 3" x 4.5". In near fine condition with a very faint flattened crease near the middle-left of the card and mild smudges to the verso which is blank. Fantastic little advertisement for a baker in the mid-size town of Belleville Illinois now a suburb of St. Louis. The printing job is just a bit amateurish with some light mis-alignment of the title which extends just beyond the right border. This suggests a local job probably done on a hand-press rather than at an industrial printing house. The number 98 is printed at the bottom left which could potentially be a date for the card 1898 but the contents would suggest it's earlier. The graphic depicts a hirsute military figure releasing a comically large amount of condensation from a trumpet or cornet and the caption below inexplicably reads "There's Millions In It." This is probably a reference to a character in Mark Twain's popular 1873 novel "The Gilded Age"; a would-be entrepreneur named Colonel Sellers always caught up in a harebrained scheme to get rich. Since the novel's popularity peaked in the 1870s it seems more likely that this card dates form that period rather than 1898 but it's difficult to say. A local history volume "A History of Belleville" by Nebelsick 1939 notes that Karl Merck Sr. founded the bakery in 1835 and that his son Charles took it over at some point. A charming piece of color lithography and midwestern Americana with what strikes this cataloguer as a probable Mark Twain connection. Note that the photograph in our listing shows a good bit of "fading" to the text at top. This seems to be from camera lighting as the type is rather bolder than it looks here. Chas. Merck & Son unknown