MUSIC STORES AND PUBLISHERS

Box 180

(103 items)
During the 19th century, as well as the early part of the 20th, many music stores used title pages of their publications to advertise themselves pictorially. John Cole of Baltimore was the first American publisher to adopt this practice when he used an often sung piece with a picture of a Bavarian girl singing "Buy a Broom". The young lady was displayed in front of Cole's music store, on the window of which were facsimile sheets of the other Cole publications. "Buy a Broom" shortly thereafter appeared on the sheet music covers of Fleetwood and Mesier, New York publishers, who illustrated the song with reproductions of their own stores. When the 1840s brought color lithography to sheet music, it was used extensively by publishers in New York,Philadelphia, Chicago and St. Louis, with views of entire blocks of stores with their own store nicely in the center of the block. One Philadelphia publisher seized on the bloomer girl craze in 1851 to picture the buxom young lady in front of its store, with the store name almost as large as the song title. Smaller cities and towns, such as Providence and others, adopted the convention of showing the picture of their establishments behind the songs advertised for sale.

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