Antiques & Advertising

Collecting and displaying the collectibles of the old country store has become popular as finer antiques have become more expensive and scarce. Restaurants often decorate their walls with antique advertising, old bottles and boxes from everyday items carried in the general stores of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

To aid the dating of the packaging and advertising materials, it's helpful to know the designs that were in current fashion at the time. Usually the packaging was about ten years after the fashion was popular in decorating. It therefore helps to know the difference between Victorian, Art Nouveau and Art Deco designs.

Pictures of company buildings were popular by the 1880s as were metals and awards. Female figures were first used during the Civil War and are dated like comic figures, by their popularity or the clothing fashion. Trains, cars and airplanes can date an advertisement as can printing techniques.

Antique advertising memorabilia from the nineteenth century has both monetary and historic value but the advertising from the well known brands like Coca Cola, General Mills(Betty Crocker), H.J. Heinz, Morton Salt, Proctor and Gamble, Ivory Soap, Nabisco, Pepsi-Cola,Quaker Oaks and Planters Peanuts are in great demand and command higher prices.

Over the last 150 years, tin containers used in the U.S.have told the story of advertising as they have become collectible. Tin was first used to preserve and carry food for the British army in 1813 but came into commercial use in the U.S.around 1825. American made tin containers were lithographed with the firm's name and design directly on the metal for advertising. The canning industry was started as the Civil War brought on the need for perserved foods. Firms like Van Camp, Libby Mc Neil and Anderson and Campbell started producing canned goods from 1861 into the late 90s and then grew to became the famous firms that exist today.

Most antique advertising tin collectors specialize in a popular areas like tobacco, tea and coffee cans, biscuit, beer, baking powder and spice, drustore items, talcom powder, gunpowder and cleansers.

Rarity, shape and condition always dictate the value of tin containers. Most tins can be dated by the design techniques, the shape of the can and the age of the company. Early cans were stenciled or hand- painted on a" Japanned" tin (a golden brown background called asphaltum). Later, after 1875, antique advertising designs and labels were hand-painted, decal or lithographed on the tin.