Jay T. Last Collection of Beverage Prints and Ephemera

The Jay T. Last Collection of Beverage Prints and Ephemera contains approximately 3,240 printed items advertising beverage products and related businesses in the United States from the 1840s to the 1940s, with the bulk of the items spanning from 1850 to 1915. The collection consists largely of lithographed ephemeral items produced for American businesses affiliated with the manufacture, distribution, and sale of beverages such as coffee, tea, juice, milk, carbonated beverages, and alcoholic drinks including beer, wine, whiskey, and other liquors.

Materials are arranged in two series: small-size items (11 x 14 inches or less) and large-size items (more than 11 x 14 inches). Small-size items are described broadly at the series level; large-size items and select small-size items are fully inventoried and all printers, artists, and publishers are indexed by name. The collection includes approximately 65 large-size items comprised mainly of lithographed advertising prints and product labels for tea, coffee, and spirits. Small-size items number nearly 3,200 and contain a variety of promotional materials including trade cards, calendars, die-cut scraps, booklets, and printed billheads and letterheads with manuscript text.

The collection deals with beverage production, merchandising, advertising, and consumption -- including depictions of families and other groups drinking together -- and the images provide a resource for studying the history of American beer, liquor, coffee, tea, and carbonated beverage industries along with the evolution of their advertising in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Materials in the collection produced for manufacturers and distributors of alcoholic beverages also provide a perspective on their advertising strategies in the face of a growing temperance movement in the United States leading up to Prohibition. As graphic materials, the prints offer evidence of developing techniques and trends in printmaking, and of the artists, engravers, lithographers, printers, and publishers involved in the creative process.