I can’t help you with this one; I found it loose, among miscellaneous ephemera, at a flea market. Who is this smirking urchin? Is he really a good example for the little ones? Why do I suspect that this caddy business is a front for something shadier? (Posted by Doug Skinner)

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“Parejas del Mundo” was published by Naipes Heraclio Fournier, Vitoria, Spain. Animals and people of different lands are to be paired; our cheery seal will soon meet an Eskimo. Is that a spear, Señor Esquimal? I suspect this pair will not become amigos. (Posted by Doug Skinner, with thanks to Gail Freund)

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Whitman released this detective game, “Who Is the Thief?”, in 1966. The players were instructed to pair suspects and witnesses, including this jaunty bum, to find the jewel thief. (Posted by Doug Skinner)

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Sometime after many debits, credits, and payments in trade and cash for dry goods and groceries were recorded in an 1857 ledger book, one of the early residents of Georgetown Township in Ottowa County, Michigan, made thrifty use of it in pursuit of her literary ambitions.* Beautiful ink script chronicling purchases of shoes, flour, candy, […]

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  “Spoof, the Cheer-Up Game” was published in 1916 by Milton Bradley.  According to the rules booklet, the images on the cards “represent excellent examples of early Peruvian art, as practiced by the Inca Indians.” (Posted by Doug Skinner)

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           I recently indulged in an old childhood pleasure — looking through my mother’s own childhood scrapbook.  Its contents are both long-familiar and long-forgotten. But each time I reacquaint myself with the birthday cards, Brownie badges, telegrams, and programs from many Glee Club recitals, something “new” stands out. Just like memory, we see what we need to see, and are blind […]

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  I assume this isolated card is from an early edition of “Authors.”  There have been many versions over the years; they chart not only changing tastes in design, but in those authors a child was taught were canonical.  I haven’t seen any later editions that include George Bancroft; I guess he was usurped by younger […]

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For 35¢ you could give your beloved the gift of sound — in the form of an Amazing Talking-Tape Card. This particular example was made by the now defunct White & Wyckoff Manufacturing Company of Holyoke, MA. Since 1889, White & Wyckoff had been part of a thriving paper industry in Western Massachusetts towns such […]

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  It’s Friday at the Ullage Group, and time for another children’s card game.  For late arrivals, or for the perplexed, we explain that we offer a sample from this most marginal, disposable, anonymous, and overlooked field of graphic design as a weekly lagniappe.  I have no date or publisher for this edition of that perennial […]

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About ten years ago, I discovered this Japanese cartoon while skimming through a circa-1940s scholarly journal. I don’t recall what it was doing there, or why, or that it had any particular relevance to the critical essays I was perusing, which is no doubt why it caught my attention. (Nor do I remember much about […]

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