JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2526

This title sounds highly romanticized, I know, but it is in some sense pretty close to the truth.  This distributor/manufacturer catalog offered the daily bits and pieces of the business end of personal and, well, business life. The sections of this heavily illustrated catalog includes  the stuff of day-in and day-out life management: “for sale” and price tags, jewelry tags, colored marking tags, clasp envelopes, key tags, coin mailing cards, white and colored labels, address and mailing labels, notarial and lawyers seals, sealing tape, binding accessories, paper fasteners, sealing wax sets, desk set bookcases, gummed seals, holiday merchandise, sealing wax, tissue paper, crepe paper (with actual colorful samples), confetti, wedding cake boxes, overhead decorative displays, and such.

It is interesting to see pictures of these things that are (mostly) still with us now but different–they can elicit memories much like the smell of a kindergarten classroom . They were familiar and common objects once upon a time, essential and mostly invisible–but now, 70-odd years later, the near-memories might be close to the surface, waiting for a visual push to recognition.