Cards

1920? Jean de La Fontaine portrait card with his signature. Les Signatures de Personnages Célèbres. Including an illustration of “The Rat Who Retired from the World.” $8 from Bertrand Cocq, Calonne-Ricouart, France, Sept., ’20. The verso has a life of Fontaine. I am curious about the two letters or symbols that appear after the “De la fontaine” signature, where, by the way, all three capitals are reversed from the present orthography.

2018 Flattop Aesop card. Garbage Pail Kids. #6a of 19. Topps Company. $1.25 from GamesandCards, Los Angeles, through Ebay, July, ’21. Extra copy for $1.99 from CSC on Amazon, July, '21. Apparently this card comes from a series titled “We Hate the ‘80s.” Others will understand better than I if this character has anything to do with the character we know as Aesop. From what I know of “Garbage Pail Kids,” the scene depicted here fits! Even though our collection now boasts of 22 different kinds of cards, I could not find a category into which this card fit!

1880 1 card picturing WC. No advertising printed on either side. Gibson Company, Southern Ohio. 3" x 4½". $10 from The Cartophilians, March, '98. The illustration is Harrison Weir's (unacknowledged). I suspect that the card's date is date of a general printing permit rather than this card; if it is for this card, it would be some of Weir's earliest work, I believe. The text is not taken from the thirty I have catalogued to date.

1885? A Booklet of 7 colored fable illustrations advertising Wright's Indian Vegetable Pill Company of New York. $40 from Becky Peach, Waterbury,CT, through Ebay. Feb., '99. Six of the seven pictures match those on cards used for J. & P. Coats Spool Cotton, McPhail Pianos, Emerson Pianos, and other advertisers. CP is not used. OF--of which I do not have a separate advertising card--is used. It is called, as in the reference to it on the Butler and Kelley GGE card there, "The Frogs and the Bull." We read of the frog that "he kept on swelling himself until he bursted." The morals of the fables are tied into Wright products in surprising fashion. Thus after "The Fighting Cocks and the Eagle" we read "Crow only with good reason, which is the case when you use Roman Eye Balsam for weak and inflamed eyes and eyelids." After FC we read "Had the crow used Wright's I.V. pills for her indigestion and Anodyne for her teeth, the fox would not have succeeded in his purpose." How so? What was wrong with her digestion? After "The Swan and the Cook" we read "The swan saved his life by his song; you may save yours by using Peery's Dead Shot Vermifugre, a 'dead shot' against those foes to health--worms." Other fables include GGE, LM, and TH. Very good condition. A real find!

1900? 7 colored cards of one size advertising Wheeler & Wilson Sewing Machines, and two cards of a slightly larger size. All have the Wheeler & Wilson logo, a circle in blue ink, with a white ring identifying the company and an inner circle of "W & W" in red.

1880? A full set of twelve gold-background cards with La Fontaine scenes and French titles. 2½" x 4". The scenes are again identical with those pictured on cards by Charles Wemple and Martin Kronheim of NY. $35 from Lee Fichtner, South Grafton, MA, through eBay, May, '10. Also 11 of 12 cards picturing La Fontaine fable scenes against a gold background. 2½" x 4". The scenes are identical with those pictured on cards by Charles Wemple and Martin Kronheim of NY. $13.50 from joseebunk, Kennebunk, ME, through eBay, Sept., '09. Also ten of the complete set of twelve (minus "Frog and Mouse" and "Heron") for $12 from Pat and Michael Madden, Schaumburg IL, March, '19. Several years ago I found a full set of Wemple/Kronheim cards with green backgrounds after struggling to find eight individual cards. They bear no markings besides the fable's name in French. The card lacking from the second set is FM. The gold background invites scratches. Some of the printing here is not exact. The versos are all blank.

1880? 8 cards (from a set of 12?) fable-illustrated stock trade cards lithographed in pink and green by (Charles) Wemple and (Martin) Kronheim of NY. Each card is signed "Wemple & Kronheim" and advertises Jones & Davis, Druggists & Pharmacists, 44 Central Street, in Central Falls, RI. $30 from Paul at Rummage-O-Rama, West Allis, Feb., '98. The cards come off as garish because of the color! See references nearby to other Wemple & Kronheim cards in this series, though not with these colors! Did the printer really want them to come out this way? I think it may be rare to find so many from one old advertising source. Each card has some remains of an old scrapbook on its otherwise blank back. The eight fables here are:

1880? 2 cards from the green set by Wemple and Kronheim, stamped "Reward of Merit." $2.50 each from Postcard Canada, Burlington, Ontario, Jan., '00. These cards of "The Two Dogs" and "The Dog and His Master's Dinner" include a prose text of the fable on the back side. I believe that the two cards did not come from the same printing, since they use different typeface for "Reward of Merit" and since their ink's hue tends to green and to blue, respectively.

1900? One fable-illustrated stock trade card of FC advertising "Aux Filles du Calvaire: Grands Magasins." 2½" x 3¾". $5 from Bernard Cocq, March, '01. This card is identical with that in the WMF set with these exceptions: it prints "Aus Filles du Calvaire" and "Le Corbeau et le Renard" on the picture side; it uses half the text side for advertising; on the lower half of the text page it gives the fable's title again and just six of its lines. This card is slightly smaller than its equivalent in the WMF set. Though the same image is used, a smaller portion of it is printed.

1880? Full set of 12 fable-illustrated stock trade cards lithographed by Charles Wemple and Martin Kronheim of NY. Each card is signed "Wemple & Kronheim" and marked "Series No 52." 2½" x 4". $29.99 from Alice Kozlowski, Holyoke, MA, through eBay, Jan., '06. After struggling to find eight individual cards, often including some advertising, I was delighted to have the presumably full set of twelve fall into my lap on eBay. This set has no advertising on either side. The scenes I had found are TH, LM, FM, FS, WL, "The Dog and His Master's Lunch," "The Heron," "The Eagle, the Lamb, and the Crow," and "The Rat and the Frog." New are FC, "The Hare and the Frogs," "Two Goats," and "The Dogs, the River, and the Hide." The versos are all blank. The cards are characterized by an unusual combination of green ink and tan background. "The Dog with His Master's Dinner" departs significantly from the illustration offered in the WMF series above.

1880? 8 cards from a set of 12 fable-illustrated stock trade cards lithographed by Charles Wemple and Martin Kronheim of NY. Each card is signed "Wemple & Kronheim" and marked either "Series No 52" or "Series 52." 2½" x 4". $30 for 6 from Robert and Gloria Mascarelli of Accent East Gallery, E. Patchogue, NY, somewhere, sometime in 1996-97. Two more for $6 each from Virginia Makis, Springfield, MA, through Ebay, Feb., '00. One card as a gift from Tom Beckman, May, '94. The eight scenes are TH, LM, FM, WL, "The Dog and His Master's Lunch," "The Heron," "The Eagle, the Lamb, and the Crow," and "The Rat and the Frog." Tom Beckman has written about finding the set of twelve, in his case distributed by the L.G. Williams shoe store in Malden, MA. The cards are characterized by an unusual combination of green ink and tan background. Some have fable texts--but no more--on the back. The Beckman FS card, imprinted by J. A. Parker Job Printing, is unusual in that it was overprinted by the very company that intended to use it. The Makis card of the "The Rat and the Frog" has an unusual stamp advertising "Only genuine hand-picked peanuts sold for 5 cts, Charlie Goodwin." WL is stamped on the picture-side by "O.B. Deane, Taxidermist & Bird Dealer" in Springfield, MA. "The Dog with His Master's Dinner" departs significantly from the illustration offered in the WMF series above. I include an illustration of the one extra copy of FM to show the difference in color of printing even within one design.

1900? 12 fable-illustrated stock trade cards included in a packet listing all twelve. This packet, marked "A Merry Christmas," includes "W.F.M." (not WMF) and "Ent. Stat. Hall." It is titled "Aesop's Fables: Twelve Illustrations with Fables at Back." 2½" x 4". Each card has in subtle red ink along its edges both "S.R. de la Perle" and "Lith. Bognard Jne" where the last two letters are unclear. Might they stand for "Jeune"? £18.36 from Dawn Holmas, Rudyard, England, through eBay, March, '05. Here is another full set of these picture cards of fables, apparently identical with the set I have marked WMF Trade Cards. As there, the multi-colored pictures here have a gray background. The picture-side of the card is without print. The text-side, landscape in orientation like all of the pictures, presents only a title and a text. The paper used here is thicker than that used there. This is thus the better set to work from. The confusion between "WMF" there and "WFM" here is puzzling.Also puzzling is the marking of a pack of fable cards as a Christmas present.