The Rubberstamp Museum displays selections from our collection of rubber stamps and stamp sets dating back to the 1800’s.
When we started making rubber stamps, back in the late 70s, we thought we had invented the concept of pictorial rubber stamps.
We were wrong.
We had been doing art and wine shows, doll shows and just about any show we could find that included arts and crafts. We talked our way into a large show on collectibles and paper ephemera.
Collectible shows were a new market for us. The shows were very professional and usually located in convention halls at Exposition centers outside the city. The collectible shows attracted a wide variety of dealers. Some dealers just dealt in paper goods: post cards, comic books, antique books and posters. There were furniture dealers, dealers with antique clothing and jewelry, dea
lers of dolls and toys. You could find household goods, tools, and items with specialty themes, like Disney or name brand items- such as Esso or Chevy. There was a historical perspective on America at these shows. It was while we were working the collectible shows that we discovered the truth about rubber stamps and their history. It happened gradually but began with an exciting discovery.
We used to take turns manning the booth so we could each have a chance to walk the shows and explore. One day while rummaging through a vendor’s display, the dada man discovered a box of old rubberstamps.
It was a very wonderful box of rubber stamps. The box had a four color lithographed picture top and an assortment of stamps in a theme of a circus. There were animal stamps and a clown and a ringmaster and a beautiful bareback rider atop her horse. There was a lion and the tamer with a whip. There were elephants and dogs in ruffled collars. The box also contained a small stamp pad, a pad of paper and a box of 4 crayons.
He brought it back to our booth in a state of awe. “Look at this! A whole set of circus stamps and the dealer says he may have another set. He says it is a different kind – just letters and numbers.” We had never seen anything like it. We marveled at the collection, wondered about the date it might have been made. The rubber was an old-fashioned black rubber, very thin and a bit brittle, but deeply etched and cut in a square to fit the base of the raised wooden handles. We tried stamping them and were delighted to see that the impressions they made were still pretty clear.
My turn around the show yielded another small set called ”American Print Set”, a box with rubber type and a small wooden handle with grooves to hold the letters and a tiny tweezers to lift and place the miniscule letters into position to form words. His next turn around found some loose stamps of cartoon characters from the 40’s scattered among the items in another dealer’s booth. We were amazed and flabbergasted.
We felt like treasure hunters carrying home our loot. There was a history of rubber stamps that we had never known and we were becoming historians.
This was all most intriguing. How far back did this rubber stamp history extend? We were beginning to realize that we were not the beginning of a movement, but the phase of one and we wanted to learn more.
It seemed that at every collectible show we worked had some kind of stamp set hidden away in a dealers display. We were amazed to find toy sets dating back to the early 1900s. We found farm sets and train sets and sets from world wars and cartoon strips. There were sets in wooden boxes and cardboard boxes and tin boxes.
Most of the stamps were simply black rubber mounted onto simple wooden blocks. They were cut from a kind of molding that formed the handle. But some stamps were flat topped and decorated with pasted on paper labels printed in full color illustrating the design. These sets were mostly based on themes of holidays, Mother Goose or cartoon characters.
Obviously there was a history here that we needed to study.
We discovered that soon after vulcanization was perfected the idea of making movable type from rubber became popular. We found wooden cases produced as early as 1870 containing sets of letters and numbers with words like “per dozen” and “ea.” and of course the required dollar and cent signs. These were called “Sign printing sets” and were the earliest rubber stamp sets produced. They were made for practical purposes: for merchants could print price signs for their merchandise that looked professional but did not require hiring a printer or buying preprinted label sets. Since merchandise prices might change quickly, with the season or availability of goods, these rubber type printing sets were real money savers for the store owner who could change prices by simply stamping out a new sign. The pointing hand and arrow that were included in some sets added extra emphasis.
There were a wide variety of type styles and sizes in these sets. Some were only upper case and simple block lettering. But some sets contained upper and lower case letters as well as numbers, dollar and cent signs. There were sets produced in elaborate type styles with curlicues and elaborate flourishes. Almost all the sets were cased in lovely large wooden boxes. They were often equipped with wooden rulers and simple twisted wire guides for locking the stamps into place on the grooved rulers so letters and numbers could line up straight for printing. Sometimes we found a set that was scarcely used with its original stamp pad and instruction book still tidily tucked into the case.
Stamps of figures rather than just letters and numbers began with the advent of the popularity of the comic strip in the late 1800’s. The Yellow Kid was the first cartoon to become popular in the newspapers. But the Brownies were a smash hit from the first printing of their adventures. These tiny gnome-like figures were designed to represent basic story characters such as a policeman, a golfer, a Chinese mandarin, an Afro-American dandy with a cane, a business man, Indian with a feather headdress, a peculiar Uncle Sam figure and oddly enough, a set of twins. They appeared regularly in newspapers and even had story books published about their antics.
In 1896, for the Chicago World’s Fair, the first figurative set of rubber stamps was produced and the Brownies were the subjects. There were two different sets produced of the Brownies characters. They were available either in a box of six stamps or a box of twelve different stamps. They came in a wooden box with a sliding top. The box tops had a two color paper label pasted on top. The set included a small felt pad on a wooden base and pad of paper. They were sold at the World’s fair and at Marshall Field and Co., the prestigious Chicago department store. Miraculously we managed to acquire both sets. Though the pads dried up long ago, the stamps still print reasonably well. Another collector friend found us a copy of the original 1896 ad for the sets that furnished more information about the pricing and how the stamps were merchandised.
We soon became familiar to all the dealers at the collectible shows as “those people who collect old stamp sets”. We came to know many antique dealers and they were kind enough to hunt through their stock to try and find more sets for us. All over the country dealers were saving stamp sets for us. The toy dealers were a mother lode of merchandise and information. They helped us determine the dates of stamp sets by noticing toys that matched the stamp designs and arriving at dates for the sets of stamps we acquired.
The more we collected the more we began to understand the chronology. As we gathered sets we began to learn how to date them from patent information and by observing the style of dress worn by the people pictured on the box tops. There were additional clues in the styles of lettering and the type of inkpads included in the set.
We were starting to create the museum.
The museum always included a gallery.
Picasso Gaglione founded the first StampArt Museum in 1990, in San Francisco. The history of that museum was recently the subject of a large show at the Stendhal Gallery in New York City. The complete catalog collection of the gallery shows is now part of the permanent collection of the Archive Library of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Each month the Gallery section of the Museum features the work of artists using rubber stamps as a main component of their art. Picasso’s concept was to feature artists whose work was known throughout the Mailart network as well as emerging artists whose work was just beginning to be recognized. He continued to develop the museum after the move to Chicago and this new venture was called the Rubber Stamp Museum.
Exhibitions this year have included visual poetry by Scott Helmes, hand carved stamps by Denise Neosho, faux post by Michael Thompson, and original stamp works by Neal Taylor.
