Gordon A. Pfeiffer nineteenth-century Delaware trade card collection

The Gordon A. Pfeiffer nineteenth-century Delaware trade card collection comprises over one thousand trade cards (2 linear feet) of Delaware suppliers and merchants.

The collection of trade cards largely features merchants with addresses on or nearby Wilmington’s Market Street and demonstrates an increased availability of Delaware goods and services, particularly in downtown city-centers. In addition, the highly decorative and colorful trade cards reveal an increasing complexity in advertising that targeted a burgeoning Delaware middle class. Some cards also depict commonly held social attitudes towards race gender and class. The trade card collection maintains Pfeiffer’s original arrangement as two series, both arranged alphabetically: Merchants and Location.

Series I. consists of Delaware trade cards organized alphabetically by merchant name. Operating from Wilmington’s Market Street or nearby locations, Wilmington merchants used trade cards to advertise goods such as soap, boots, oysters, produce, dry goods, notions, harnesses, java coffee, hosiery, standard cures, and watches. Trade cards in this series advertised Shakespeare and comedy shows at Wilmington’s still operational Grand Opera House. Other trade cards sold train excursions from Wilmington to Atlantic City, offered advice on child-rearing, or marketed dyspepsia, worm, and other cure-alls. Some cards innovative designs suggest an increasingly sophisticated advertising industry. Decorative cards include those shaped as painter’s palettes, oysters, fish, and flowers and also in "puzzle" trade cards: Cards posing questions that, when held against light, reveal a solution (often the name of the business).

Series II. comprises Delaware trade cards organized alphabetically by location. Trade cards from the towns of Camden, Delaware City, Dover, Laurel, Middletown, Milford, Smyrna, and St. Georges, among others, are included in this series. In addition, many trade cards in this series were created with chromolithographic processes and exhibit bold, vibrant colors.