The ubiquitous trade cards were a larger part of the child’s visual experience than printed books (Jay, Trade Card, 91).although chromolithographed advertising cards were plentiful, the scrapbook compilers treated them as though they were valuable. They saved them; they treasured them within the often elaborate bindings of the scrapbooks and framed them on the page to maximize their appeal. This treatment itself bestowed value on the cards.
Page 73
Arrangements themselves were often quilt-like, playing vertical against horizontal cards or using irregular-shaped cards as rhythmic elements…cutting the pictures out and arranging multiple items on the page became an exercise in skill. Such cutout pages ultimately emphasize the miscellaneousness of the pictures, the disparities of scale, and the divergence of style. The effect is of variety and profusion.
Page 74
Collecting
Middle-class Victorian Americans were passionate collectors and classifiers. Collecting was praised as good training in observation and in the valued skill of assigning and recognizing categories, of visually and tangibly taking possession of the world by naming and classifying it.
In Ruutz-Rees’s use of the term, the “collecting” of postage stamps, of fossils, and of insect specimens are equivalent. In each, the collector learns habits of looking and reading both the three-dimensional and printed landscape:
The eyes once opened to look for fossils, are awakened to a thousand facts hidden before….A collector of fossils is like a person with second-sight. To him every particle of the Earth’s surface is fraught with meaning, and, his senses once fully awakened, new facts dawn upon him like a continuous revelation (Ruuts-Rees, Home Occupations, 89).
Page 75
Such arrangements seem to highlight the appearance of the cards and ignore the product, but their reliance on the overlap between the calling cards, banks, and trade cards gives the trade card a quasi-familiar and even quasi-familial status. It reinforces the advertisers own attempts to overcome facelessness and become like a social caller, like a friend or acquaintance who leaves a card on the silver tray on the hall stand. The format of trade cards positioned children’s and other readers’ interaction with the advertiser as a privileged social one, with the advertiser entitled to admission into the family circle on the same basis as a friend or family member.
Page 78
….Williams notes of the department store that “when rugs are placed on the ceiling, walls, and floor of the vestibule, when the same item is repeated over and over, with minor variations…the sheer accumulation becomes awesome in a way that no single item could be.” (Williams, Dream Worlds, 69, 71). In the scrapbook as well as the department store, internal consistency is not the point of the “hodgepodge of visual themes”. Rather, the desperate and contradictory materials together express “distance from the ordinary”.
Page 84
No comments:
Post a Comment