The Birthday Daisy Chain, by Ernest Nister. London: Ernest Nister; New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., ca. 1890-1900. Smith Miniatures Collection [Z1033.T68 .B57 1890z], Special Collections and Archives, University of Iowa Libraries. Photo: Sara Pinkham.
From co-curator Elizabeth Yale: This simple, fragile paper card, given to celebrate a personal sentimental moment, is the work of many hands and the product of a complex, industrialized, hierarchical manufacturing process. That contrast fascinates me. In an 1897 issue of the magazine Hearth and Home, writer Edith Cuthell recounted a visit to Ernest Nister’s Nuremberg factory, one of the sites where cards like The Birthday Daisy Chain, with its cherubic children and picturesque country scenes, were made. Designers, including both men and women, created the imagery. Engravers, mostly men, transferred drawings to lithographic stones for printing.
Cuthell described the painstaking process for producing a chromolithograph: “The engravers are the most highly-paid and most skilful of the workmen. Magnifying-glass in eye they transfer to the stone, in delicate and elaborate lines, the artist’s sketches before them. The limestone is specially prepared, and on it the drawing is traced in chalk or with a fine pen with prepared ink. For every color a separate stone has to be prepared.” Each stone was then printed separately in its color, with perfect registration between images. Workers then cut out the card parts and constructed them.
Describing the factory floor, Cuthell wrote that “Crowds of stolid German maidens with the wealth of hair so characteristic of their race, were busily gumming, sewing, binding, and manipulating every description of card and book. We especially noticed the deft way in which they constructed pretty little cardboard Swiss chalet cards with a Christmas greeting on the floor within, and which are made to fold up to go in an envelope. Verily, of ingenuity of the designers there is no end!” Cuthell praised the “stolid German maidens” but privileged the ingenuity of the designers.
Source material:
- Edith E. Cuthell, “Where the Christmas Cards Are Made,” Hearth and Home 14.346 (30 Dec. 1897), 334.
- Hannah Field, Playing with the Book: Victorian Movable Picture Books and the Child Reader (Minneapolis: University of MInnesota Press, 2019), 96-97.