Birmingham Trade Card Collection

The collection consists mostly of business cards produced by companies and individuals in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th Centuries, mounted on card. It also includes some receipts and adverts. Unless stated otherwise, most of the businesses are based in Birmingham. The majority of these cards are undated.

There is no definite information available relating to the provenance of the trade cards in this collection [hence there is no accession information linked to the collection]. The collection was originally created and administered by the Local Studies and History department and came under the jurisdiction of the Archives Department when the two departments merged in 2008.

From anecdotal information, it is believed that the collection was put together at some point in the late 1970s/80s after it was recognised there was a requirement to retain such a collection. Similar library stock related collection projects sprung up in this period when the Central Library employed well over 350 members of staff.

Staff working on the project in the Local Studies team would have mounted the illustrations with assistance from Conservation; the illustrations were probably pooled from surplus copies of the Birmingham trade directories along with an existing small trade card collection. Staff would have numbered the mounted cards [these numbers now forming the reference numbers] and produced a corresponding card index. The indexes were divided between one listing the name of the company/firm, another referenced according to trade and the third by location in the UK - the collection does have national coverage.

The collection has been used by trade card specialists in the past and the items are of particular interest to fine art and lithography students. In order to make the collection more available, promote it and make it visible on online catalogues, this catalogue was created during June/July 2017 by inputing data straight from the collection's handwritten card index. As a result it contains only the limited information on each item given by the index cards and may contain spelling errors copied from the original index.