| Title |
Hires Root Beer Company 1891 |
| Category |
| Booklet, gallery |
| Why It's Interesting |
|
This charming booklet partly tells an illustrated story about a girl called Little Mabel, but seems most interesting to me because consisting mostly of a history and description of the Hires Root Beer Company. The text includes woodcut-like pictures of Mr. Hires’ private office; the main office; the second floor–printing office; the second floor–advertising room; third floor–bottling and packing room; and fourth floor–laboratory. Hires sold bottles of extract, not a ready-made drink. Sales had risen from 864 bottles in 1879 to 1,296,000 in 1890, in which year Hires distributed 4 million “beautiful picture cards, printed in ten colors, gladdening as many persons, brightening their homes and lives, . . .” Buyers made root beer at home by mixing a bottle with 4 pounds of sugar, 5 gallons of water [lukewarm was best], and half a pint of good fresh yeast [or half a cake of fresh compressed yeast.] |
This website seeks to encourage researchers and collectors to discover and study obscure ephemera that document American culture and life. Worldcat reveals that most of the items that I post cannot be found in more than a few research libraries–often none at all. Alternately, research libraries do not bother to catalog ephemeral publications like these. I believe, however, that because these were distributed free, or at nominal cost, to consumers, they were the publications most likely to make their way into homes and be read by large numbers of Americans.
I acquire pre-1960 examples of the kinds of publications that prove so useful when scholars study 19th-Century America. The limited competition that I encounter for them suggests that libraries, which could easily outbid me, have little interest in post-Civil War and 20th-century ephemeral publications in general.
I try to anticipate what materials future historians will find useful. Being an historian first and a collector second, I organized this website to encourage others to do this too—even if this means new competition for me. I am aware that I could be wrong in prizing particular ephemera or even whole classes of ephemera. I may even be wrong to encourage scholars to study obscure ephemeral publications; these may be obscure for good reason.
Ephemerastudies.org will permit me to share with others the information and imagery that I am acquiring, and to benefit from the knowledge, intelligence and experience of other scholars and collectors. Please contact me with your impressions of the site.
