Jay T. Last Collection of Entertainment: Circus Prints and Ephemera: Finding Aid

Finding aid prepared by Diann Benti and Charla DelaCuadra.

The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

Prints and Ephemera

The Huntington Library

1151 Oxford Road

San Marino, California 91108

Phone: (626) 405-2191

Email: reference@huntington.org

URL: http://www.huntington.org

Overview of the Collection

Title: Jay T. Last Collection of Entertainment: Circus Prints and Ephemera

Dates (inclusive): 1846-1990s

Bulk dates: 1890-1960

Collection Number: priJLC_ENT_Circus

Collector: Last, Jay T.

Extent: approximately 870 items

Repository: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Prints and Ephemera

1151 Oxford Road

San Marino, California 91108

Phone: (626) 405-2191

Email: reference@huntington.org

URL: http://www.huntington.org

Abstract: The Jay T. Last Collection of Entertainment: Circus Prints and Ephemera contains more than 850 printed items that relate to circuses in the United States from the 1846 to the 1990s. The collection consists of advertising and promotional materials, business records, and illustrations produced for or pertaining to circuses, their tours and shows, staff and performers, acts and exhibits, and animals.

Language: English.

Note:

Finding aid last updated on February 19, 2020.

Access

Open to qualified researchers by prior application through the Reader Services Department. For more information, contact Reader Services.

Administrative Information

Publication Rights

The Huntington Library does not require that researchers request permission to quote from or publish images of this material, nor does it charge fees for such activities. The responsibility for identifying the copyright holder, if there is one, and obtaining necessary permissions rests with the researcher.

Preferred Citation

[Item title, Call number]. Jay T. Last Collection of Entertainment: Circus Prints and Ephemera, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Provenance

This collection forms part of the Jay T. Last Collection of Graphic Arts and Social History, which was donated to the Huntington Library by Jay T. Last in 2005 as a gift in progress. The bulk of the Circus Prints and Ephemera were transferred to the Library between 2010 and 2013.

Background

The Jay T. Last Collection is an unparalleled archive of printed paper artifacts that documents American lithographic, social, and business history. The collection began in the early 1970s when physicist and Silicon Valley pioneer Jay Last moved to Southern California and started collecting citrus box labels he found at local flea markets and rummage sales. As his collection grew, Last realized that these labels conveyed important information about commercial printing, graphic design, and social history, and he expanded his collection to include other forms of American visual culture. Today this collection contains more than 200,000 lithographic prints, posters, and ephemera of mostly nineteenth- and early twentieth- century American origin and represents works by more than five hundred lithographic companies.

Scope and Content

The Jay T. Last Collection of Entertainment: Circus Prints and Ephemera contains more than 850 printed items that relate to circuses in the United States from the 1846 to the 1990s. The collection consists of advertising and promotional materials, business records, and illustrations produced for or pertaining to circuses, their tours and shows, staff and performers, acts and exhibits, and animals.

Materials are arranged in three series: small-size prints and ephemera (11 x 14 inches or less); large-size prints and ephemera (more than 11 x 14 inches); and broadsides and handbills. The small-size items are described broadly at the series level; large-size items are fully inventoried and all printers, artists, and publishers are indexed by name; and the broadsides and handbills contain item-level entries that include the circus name, date, printer (when identified), and show location (when applicable).

The collection has 220 large-size items comprised mainly of lithographic posters containing brightly colored images of featured circus acts, performers, and animals that were typically posted outdoors in advance of the circus coming to town.

Small-size items in the collection number more than 500 and are comprised mainly of advertising and promotion ephemera and business documents such as trade cards, programs and souvenir books, route cards, envelopes, tickets, songsters, and printed billheads and letterheads.

The 130 broadsides, handbills, and related advertisements consist primarily of long, narrow broadsides printed on newspaper paper in black ink using letterpress type that advertised upcoming circus shows and were intended to be distributed by hand, left in stacks in public places, or posted on walls, fences, or in windows in advance of the circus’s arrival in a town.

This collection provides a resource for studying the history of the American circus and its impact on popular entertainment and advertising in the 19th and 20th centuries. As graphic materials, the items offer evidence of the development of printmaking techniques and trends, and of the artists, engraves, lithographers, printers, and publishers involved in the creation of these prints.

Alternative Form of Materials Available

Visit the Huntington Digital Library: Jay T. Last Collection to view digitized items from this collection.

Related materials in the Huntington Library include

Note: The Huntington Library Historical Prints Collection contains one related item (priHHC_ENT_0000001) that is listed in the "Related Materials" section at the beginning of Series II in this finding aid.

Arrangement

Items are arranged in the following three series:

Series I. Circus Prints and Ephemera (small size)
Series II. Circus Prints and Ephemera (large size)
Series III. Circus Broadsides and Handbills

Indexing Terms

The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the Huntington Library's Online Catalog.

Genres

Advertisements.

Billheads.

Business cards.

Business records.

Business records -- United States -- 19th century.

Business records -- United States -- 20th century.

Chromolithographs.

Circus posters.

Ephemera.

Engravings.

Leaflets (printed works).

Letterheads.

Lithographs.

Posters.

Printed ephemera.

Prints.

Promotional materials.

Relief prints.

Trade cards.

Subjects

Acrobats -- Pictorial works.

Advertising -- Circus.

Animal trainers -- Pictorial works.

Circus -- Pictorial works.

Circus -- United States -- History -- 19th century -- Sources.

Circus -- United States -- History -- 20th century -- Sources.

Circus animals -- Pictorial works.

Circus performers -- Pictorial works.

Circus owners -- Pictorial works.

Clowns -- Pictorial works.

Curiosities and wonders -- Pictorial works.

Entertainment events -- Pictorial works.

Horsemen and horsewomen -- Pictorial works.

Women circus performers -- Pictorial works.

Printer, Publisher, Artist Index

The following is a complete list of printers, publishers, and artists represented in the large-size prints and ephemera (Series II) in this collection.

Acme Show Print (Firm)

American Show Print (Firm)

Bailey, Bill.

Biggerstaff, Bill.

Butler, Roland, 1887-1961.

Central Ptg. and Illinois Litho. Co.

Central Show Printing Co.

Chicago Show Printing Co.

Colorcraft Poster Co.

Coplan, Maxwell Frederic.

Courier Company.

Courmont Freres.

Currier & Ives.

Donaldson Litho. Co.

Erie Litho. & Ptg. Co.

Freeland, Forrest Dean, -1975.

G. & W. Endicott

Gibson & Co. (Cincinnati, Ohio)

Globe Poster Corp.

Graphics 2000 (Las Vegas, Nev.)

Howe, George, 1886-1955.

J.H. & F.F. Farwell (Firm)

Majestic Poster Press.

Neal Walters Poster Corporation.

Potthast, Edward Henry, 1857-1927.

Rimanoczy, A., 1832-1910.

Ripley, Robert L. (Robert LeRoy), 1890-1949.

Riverside Printing Company

Rothengatter, Emil, 1848-1939.

Sanford, George T.

Sharp, Howard Bird, 1877-1952.

Strobridge Lithographing Company

Triangle Poster & Printing Company

Wood, Lawson, 1878-1957.

Series I. Circus Prints and Ephemera (small size) approximately 1850-1991 (bulk 1880-1960)

Extent: approximately 520 items in 4 binders and 1 flat-top box

Scope and Content Note

This series contains over 500 printed items, 11 x 14 inches or smaller, that pertain to circuses in the United States from approximately 1850 to 1991, with the bulk of items dating from 1880 to 1960. Items consist of advertising and promotion ephemera that promote circuses or were used as business documents by circuses. Item types include trade cards, programs and souvenir books, route cards, envelopes, tickets, songsters, and printed billheads and letterheads. While some of the stationery is filled out in manuscript with miscellaneous correspondence or invoices, the series does include a substantial amount of blank letterhead.

Arrangement

Items smaller than 8 x 10 inches are housed in binders, while items that are between 8 x 10 inches and 11 x 14 inches in size are arranged numerically by call number in one box.

Binder 1

Circus, A-B by company (8 x 10 inches or smaller in size)

Physical Description: approximately 180 items

Binder 2

Circus, C-G by company (8 x 10 inches or smaller in size)

Physical Description: approximately 120 items

Binder 3

Circus, H-Q by company, also performers (8 x 10 inches or smaller in size)

Physical Description: approximately 100 items

Binder 4

Circus, R-Z by company, also performers (8 x 10 inches or smaller in size)

Physical Description: approximately 110 items

Note

Items pertaining to Ringling Bros. are housed in Binder 1 with Barnum & Bailey materials.

Box 1

Circus (between 8 x 10 inches and 11 x 14 inches in size)

Physical Description: approximately 10 items

Series II. Circus Prints and Ephemera (large size) 1846-1980s (bulk 1890-1960)

Extent: 220 items

Scope and Content

This series contains more than 200 printed 19th and 20th century circus posters. The posters date from 1846 to the 1980s, with the bulk of the items spanning from the 1890s to the 1960s. These prints were used as promotional materials and typically posted outdoors in advance of the circus coming to town. These posters, primarily color lithographs, were produced by American printers for American circuses, though there are approximately seven posters with French or German text that Barnum & Bailey used for shows in Europe in the late 1890s and early 1900s.

The posters typically contain brightly colored images of featured circus acts, performers, or animals. Many of the items include depictions of clowns, gymnasts, aerialists, acrobats, jugglers, animal trainers, or equestrians, portraits of circus owners such as P. T. Barnum, J. A. Bailey, and the Ringling Brothers, or scenes of street parades, historical pageants, circus wagons and railroad cars, tents, arenas, spectators and crowds, zoo menageries, and animals including bears, elephants, giraffes, gorillas, horses, lions, monkeys, rhinoceroses, and tigers.

The posters, primarily color lithographs, range in size from approximately 12 x 16 inches to 117 x 41 inches, and while outdoor circus posters might take up entire building walls, most of the items in the collection consist of “one-sheet” posters sized to approximately 28 x 42 inches. Approximately twenty American printing firms are represented in the collection, though the Strobridge Lithographing Company of Cincinnati, Ohio, printed more than sixty of the posters, and the Erie Litho. and Printing Company of Erie, Pennsylvania, printed nearly thirty. About a quarter of the posters have date sheets, which are small strips with printed text containing information about the date and location of a particular upcoming show, pasted to the bottom of the poster.

Among the earliest items is an 1850s four-sheet poster for A. Turner & Co’s Combined Menagerie and Circus, and one of the most recent is a 1980s poster for the Ford Bros. Circus. While over fifty circuses are represented, most have between one and ten posters; the circuses of Barnum and Bailey and the Ringling Brothers comprise the largest subset in the collection with more than eighty posters among them.

Related Material

Items in the Huntington Library Historical Prints collection:

priHHC_ENT_0000001 Al. G. Barnes trained wild animal circus : four big steel arenas in which are presented marvel acts by ferocious jungle animals. (Al G. Barnes Wild Animal Circus) 192-. View online image.

Arrangement

Items in this series are arranged numerically by call number and described in the following format:

Title of print. (Circus name) Date
Artist(s) (when known) Printer(s) Publisher(s)

priJLC_ENT_000001

The Barnum & Bailey big free street parade : is the most magnificent, largest, greatest processional spectacle ever seen given absolutely free at 10 o'clock a.m. preceding the initial exhibition of the greatest show on earth. (Barnum & Bailey Circus) ©1913.