Last (Jay T.) Collection of Printing and Publishing: Louis Prang Archive, approximately 1857-1918, bulk 1860-1897

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Summary

Title:
Jay T. Last Collection of Printing and Publishing: Louis Prang Archive
Dates:
approximately 1857-1918, bulk 1860-1897
Creators:
Last, Jay T.
Abstract:
The Louis Prang Archive, a subset of the Jay T. Last Collection of Printing and Publishing, contains over 3,650 items dating from 1857 to 1916, with the bulk of the items spanning from 1860 to 1897. This archive chronicles the business history of Boston lithographer Louis Prang through art prints, advertisements, printed volumes, and promotional ephemera produced by L. Prang & Co. and its successor companies: Prang Educational Company and Taber Prang Art Co. The archive also contains catalogs, certificates, price lists, business records and correspondence, personal letters and photographs, news clippings, and original art considered for lithographic reproduction.
Extent:
approximately 3,630 items
Language:
English and German.
Preferred citation:

[Item title, Call number]. Jay T. Last Collection of Printing and Publishing: Louis Prang Archive, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Background

Scope and content:

The Jay T. Last Collection of Printing and Publishing: Louis Prang Archive contains over 3,650 items dating from 1857 to 1916, with the bulk of the items spanning from 1860 to 1897. This archive chronicles the business history of Boston lithographer Louis Prang through art prints, advertisements, printed volumes, and promotional ephemera produced by L. Prang & Co. and its successor companies: Prang Educational Company and Taber Prang Art Co. The archive also contains catalogs, certificates, price lists, business records and correspondence, personal letters and photographs, news clippings, and original art considered for lithographic reproduction.

Materials are broadly divided into two series: printed materials (primarily items produced by or for the business) and manuscript materials (primarily items documenting business operations and the personal life of Louis Prang). Series I is further divided into three subseries: small size prints and ephemera (11 x 14 inches or smaller), large size prints and ephemera (larger than 11 x 14 inches), and hardbound volumes. Small-size items 8 x 10 inches or smaller are described broadly at the series level; large-size items and most small-size items between 8 x 10 inches and 11 x 14 inches in size are fully inventoried with printers, artists, and publishers indexed by name. The collection includes over 260 large-size items comprised mainly of lithographic art prints produced by L. Prang & Co. Small-size items number approximately 3,200 and contain a variety of materials including album cards, trade cards, calendars, booklets, catalogs, greeting cards, proof books, sample books, clippings, and small-format lithographed prints. Hardbound volumes number approximately 40 and include illustrated books with verses, art instruction texts, and children’s natural history educational books, as well as Prang’s pinnacle achievement, Oriental Ceramic Art, a sumptuously lithographed catalogue in ten volumes featuring Asian ceramics from the collection of Baltimore businessman William T. Walters (1820-1894). Series II contains mainly manuscript business correspondence, as well as memo and stock books, letters patent certificates, personal letters, and a small number of photographs. The bulk of the material is in English, but a small amount of correspondence is written in German.

The collection provides a resource for studying the business and output of one of the most influential major lithographic firms in the United States in the 19th century. The images provide information about American tastes and culture as well as the evolution of advertising strategies in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As graphic materials, the prints offer evidence of developing techniques and trends in printmaking, and of the artists, lithographers, printers, and publishers involved in the creative process.

Biographical / historical:

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.

Louis Prang (1824-1909) was a printer, lithographer, and publisher who is sometimes referred to as the “father of the American Christmas card.” He introduced holiday greeting cards to America, developed and promoted the year-round tradition of exchanging cards, and became the key producer of American greeting cards for decades.

Prang was born in Breslau in Prussian Silesia. As a teen, he apprenticed in his father’s fabric printing and dyeing factory. After arriving in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1850 and finding few opportunities for textile printers, he worked as an engraver and a lithographer. In 1856 he formed a partnership with Julius Mayer as Prang & Mayer, producing business cards, scenic views, and advertising posters. Prang founded his own firm in 1860, L. Prang & Co., and made it one of the most significant American color lithographic establishments of the 19th century.

L. Prang & Co. printed maps, battle scenes, and military portraits during the Civil War. In 1866 the firm introduced color picture cards in sets, and chromolithographs of fine art paintings that sold briskly. By December 1867 Prang had launched a quarterly periodical called Prang’s Chromo, A Journal of Popular Art, to promote and sell his prints. The publication ran until 1871, helping L. Prang & Co. become known for the artistic and technical quality of their "chromos."

Prang continued to expand his product line, adding greeting cards in 1874. They sold so well that in 1881 he printed almost 5 million cards. Prang also achieved success producing botanical and natural history lithographs as decorative prints, cards, and book illustrations for such titles as Selmar Hess’s Our Living World and Prang’s own Natural History Series for Children. Also around this time, 1882, he started the Prang Educational Company, publishers of books on art education. Then in 1897 Prang produced his pinnacle achievement, Oriental Ceramic Art. This catalogue, comprising ten large folios, featured 116 chromolithographs of vases and other decorative objects from the W. T. Walters collection. It is a benchmark work in lithographic quality and scope, with each plate requiring from 20 to 44 separate lithographic stones to print.

In 1898, L. Prang & Co. became the Taber Prang Art Company and relocated to Springfield, Massachusetts. Louis Prang retired from active business in 1899 and passed away in Los Angeles on June 14, 1909, but the companies he founded lived on. In 1912, the Prang Educational Company changed its name to the Prang Company, and the Taber Prang Art Co. continued operations until 1937.

Acquisition information:
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 Louis Prang Archive was transferred to the Library between 2010 and 2012 .
Arrangement:

The collection is arranged in the following series:

  • Series I. Printed materials
    • Subseries A. Prints and ephemera (small size)
    • Subseries B. Prints and ephemera (large size)
    • Subseries C. Hardbound volumes
  • Series II. Manuscripts, business records, and photographs

Rules or conventions:
Finding aid prepared using Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Note:

Finding aid last updated on August 14, 2017.

About this collection guide

Collection Guide Author:
Finding aid prepared by Charla DelaCuadra.
Date Prepared:
© 2016
Date Encoded:
Machine readable finding aid encoded by Charla DelaCuadra in March 2016 .

Access and use

Restrictions:

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

Terms of access:

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 Printing and Publishing: Louis Prang Archive, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Location of this collection:
1151 Oxford Road
San Marino, CA 91108, US
Contact:
(626) 405-2191
reference@huntington.org
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