Whimsy and Commerce: Magical Beings in the U.S. Patent Office Trademark Collection

The following is a guest post by Kate Phillips, Reference Librarian, Prints & Photographs Division.

In a recent post, we shared a slew of collections newly available for research. Today, we thought we’d zoom in on one of these, the graphic treasure trove that is the U.S. Patent Office Trademarks Collection. Documenting the visual identity of American companies between about 1869 and 1911, these registration cards are a fabulous resource for the study of visual communication and commerce. 

There’s a wall near our staff refrigerator where we highlight collections in progress. Recently, while microwaving my lunch, a picture of a trademark featuring a hybrid of a unicorn, lion, and dragon caught my eye. This got me wondering—what other whimsical creatures are hiding in the trademarks?  

It turns out that dragons, gnomes, giants and other fairy-tale characters can be found marketing everything from handkerchiefs to egg noodles.  

In some cases, the trademarked design is a fully realized label pasted onto a piece of bristol board, like the Little Giant Sugar Corn example above. This can make it tricky to discern the items in this collection from those in one of our other newly processed collections, the U.S. Patent Office Advertising Prints and Labels Collection. Typically, like the Giant Watches below, trademarks represent only the design framework—the logo—while labels are a more complete marketing package. 

What fairy tale would be complete without an anthropomorphized frog? The elaborate full-color example below is a favorite of Maggie McCready, the collection’s processing archivist. We promise you won’t be disappointed by downloading the high-resolution file and looking closely at the border vignettes. 

On the reverse side of this and many of the full color examples, you will find a version rendered in pen and ink. The stamp on top indicates that this was done by a Patent Office staff draftsman. These were reproduced in the Patent Office Gazette to notify the public of the registration. 

This week’s topic has the added bonus of coinciding with the 220th birthday of celebrated fairy-tale writer Hans Christian Andersen, author of The Little Mermaid. The mermaid pictured below advertises a brand of soap. 

The fairy marketing handkerchiefs below looks more to us like Little Red Riding Hood, but either way certainly conjures up the atmosphere of a fairy tale. 

We hope this post serves to spark the imagination around what one might find in this newly available collection. The student of graphic design, typography, commercial history, advertising, and more will find a wealth of data here. You’ll have to wait to see the unicorn-lion-dragon (Unligon? Dralicorn?) that first caught my eye—we’re still adding five to ten thousand new scans from this collection every year!  

Learn More: 

• An overview of the U.S. Patent Office Trademarks Collection can be found here. Currently, there are over 43,000 trademark registrations available digitally. 
• See a description of the related U.S. Patent Office Advertising Prints and Labels Collection here. Nearly 100 items from this collection have been digitized. A finding aid is available here. 
• Revisit our recent post: Ready for Research: Announcing New Collections and Additional Digital Images.