Advertising Collectibles

Before brands had logos, they had containers.

In the nineteenth century manufacturers began putting their names on the things they sold. A pot lid printed with the name of a fish paste maker. A stoneware bottle stamped with the bottler and his street. A jar that carried a company into the kitchen and stayed there long after the contents were gone. These were the first objects of mass advertising, and they were made to be kept.

Industry made it possible. Transfer printing, moulded glass and salt glazed stoneware let a maker in Staffordshire or Dundee turn out thousands of identical vessels, each one bearing a name, a town, a claim. A grocer's shelf became a landscape of type. The container was the advertisement, and unlike a printed bill it travelled home with the customer and stayed in the house.

What survives is a record of that commerce written in glass and clay. Ink bottles in aqua and amber, sold by the gross to schools and counting houses. Apothecary bottles with their original paper labels, naming remedies that no longer exist. Ginger beer bottles carrying the name of a bottler who worked a single street. Marmalade jars from Dundee, where the recipe was invented and the name became the product itself.

Collectors have valued these pieces for more than a century, though the reasons have shifted. The early collectors wanted the rarest maker or the unusual colour. What draws people now is the typography, the weight of the material, the evidence of a hand at the kiln, and the quiet fact that an object made to be thrown away was kept instead. Condition, the legibility of the printing and the survival of an original label are what set one piece apart from another.

Grouped together they read as a composition. A row of ink bottles becomes a study in colour and proportion. A set of pot lids becomes a wall of nineteenth century graphic design. They belong on a kitchen shelf, in a library, on a console, anywhere the plain authority of old commercial objects can be seen properly.