Jay T. Last Collection of Entertainment: Performing Arts Prints and Ephemera

The Jay T. Last Collection of Entertainment: Performing Arts Prints and Ephemera contains more than 2,300 printed items primarily advertising theatrical and musical entertainment and related performers in the United States from 1839 to the 1940s, with the majority of items dating from the 1870s to the 1890s. The collection consists of advertising and promotional materials, business records, and illustrations pertaining to a wide variety of performance genres that have been grouped broadly as music and theater (including theater, music, dance, burlesque, comedy, pantomime, and variety); minstrel (including minstrel shows, blackface entertainers, and female minstrels); and magic and miscellaneous (including magicians, motion pictures, and Wild West shows).

Materials are arranged into two series: small-size items (11 x 14 inches or less) and large-size items (bigger than 11 x 14 inches). 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.

The collection has 450 large-size items comprised mainly of lithographic theatrical and minstrel posters that were intended to advertise specific shows or performers.

Small-size items in the collection number approximately 1,850 and are comprised mainly of promotional ephemera and business documents such as trade cards, programs and playbills, souvenir booklets, tickets, die-cut cards, and printed billheads and letterheads with manuscript text.

The collection provides a resource for studying the history of the American theater and the evolution of advertising strategies for the performing arts in the United States in the late 19th century. As graphic materials, the items offer evidence of developing techniques and trends in printmaking, and of the artists, engravers, lithographers, printers, and publishers involved in the creation of these prints.