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18th Century Black & White French Signs

Before newspaper or television advertising, merchants used small, printed cards to stay in touch with customers. These "trade cards" began in England in the early 1700s. Earlier ones were black and white; by Victorian times, they were printed in color. They were sized like visiting cards. These evolved into collectible trading cards -- baseball cards, for example -- and, full circle, into today's business cards. England's Warwick Eighteenth Century Centre has studied a collection of French 18th-century black-and-white trade cards.

The Research
- England's Warwick Eighteenth Century Centre studied French trade cards to learn how products were advertised, what imagery appealed to consumers and how 18th-century Parisians shopped. A 2008 exhibition at Waddesdon Manor, a historic house, was called "All That Glitters: Shopping and Advertising in Eighteenth-Century Paris."
The Collection
- The collection of rare trade cards was acquired by Ferdinand de Rothschild in the 1890s. The collection, which can be viewed online, is in four volumes. The cards are interesting to historians, according to the museum, because of their ties to a time in which there was a boom in new goods and a demand for them. The collection also is telling about the relationship between commercial and fine art. Other printed material in the collection includes a 1783 ticket for a ride on the first manned flight in a hydrogen balloon.
The Merchants
- Browse the 100 cards in Waddesdon Manor highlights collection, and you will find etchings and woodcuts advertising booksellers, jewelers, clockmakers, liqueur manufacturers, painters, dressmakers and a fencing master. One card, circa 1805, is an ad for P. G. Dujon and His Performing Birds. The Napoleonic Era card depicts a bird in a soldier uniform carrying a musket and bayonet; it has the title "la Sentinelle."
In America
- While collectors likely won't find museum-quality 18th-century trade cards, American Victorian cards are popular. Trade cards followed the colonists to America -- Paul Revere advertised his business with one. Color cards were mass produced in the 1870s, but the trade cards died out by the early 1900s when magazine and newspaper advertising caught on, collector Ben Crane told Collectors Weekly.

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