Finally, a Museum Exhibit of Trade Catalogs!

I’ve collected vintage trade catalogs for years. Now they’ve gotten the museum treatment at one of America’s most famous institutions.

As you probably know by now, I love trade catalogs. So I was excited to learn that the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of all places — probably the most famous art museum in the United States, and among the most famous in the world — recently opened an exhibition of trade catalogs from its extensive catalog collection. (I didn’t even know they had a catalog collection!) It’s not often that I get to see one of my favorite artifact categories showcased in a museum setting.

I should probably take a minute here to explain why I’m so fond of trade catalogs (or salesman sample catalogs, or whatever you prefer to call them). Part of it is that it’s pleasing and satisfying to see lots of similar items grouped together, like a collection. Also, I like that that each catalog tends to be its own little self-contained world, filled with the company’s inventory-numbering system, industry jargon, assorted protocols that are just taken for granted, and so on. It’s all very specific, and I’m a big fan of specificity. Speaking of which, trade catalogs also tend to be filled with very specific solutions to very specific problems you never even thought of before — I like that.

I went to the Met yesterday to check out the exhibit (which is called, appropriately, Art of Commerce). It’s in the museum’s library and is fairly small, consisting of a few glass display cases, but they still managed to feature several dozen gorgeous catalogs. Here are the ones I particularly liked (with apologies in advance for the overhead lighting’s glare that’s sometimes visible on the display cases).

We can start with this magnificent sample catalog of patterned glass:

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Next up is a pair of Czech furniture catalogs from the 1930s, with really nice renderings of the product line:

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The color art-supply renderings on the right-side page of this next catalog really capture what I was talking about when I mentioned how satisfying it is to see groupings of similar items:

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Speaking of art supplies, I love the color depictions of paintbrushes in this next catalog, which is from 1910:

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Naturally, I love the look of this 1930 marching band uniform catalog (although I wish we could see the interior pages). The manufacturer, DeMoulin Brothers, is still in business today.

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