Cooper & Bailey 1880

Cooper & Bailey 1880, originally uploaded by bucklesw1. I've also looked through some of my earlier route books and scanned a fascinating list of people and jobs on the advance of the 1880 Cooper & Bailey show. Besides separate listings for a single lithographer and four bill posters on each car, you'll see a programmer listed, the gent who distributed the heralds or couriers (the terms were interchangeably used for many years), as well as a number of other jobs that long ago vanished from the advance. Cincinnati's Enquirer, oddly but for specific business reasons as it wished to concentrate on printing date sheets for firms doing only lithographic pictorials, limited themselves to only letterpress work from about 1911, when they moved into the building Ole Whitey might remember and occupied by them until shortly after the death of the late Harry Anderson in February 1986. Enquirer did get back to pictorial work in a big way in the 1930s when circuses didn't want to pay for the better quality litho printing afforded by car, cigarette, soap, Coke and other advertisers. The Erie printing plant, whose posters are fondly collected by circus fans, carried a reputation for doing rather poor work and so the new Cole show gave some much-needed business to Enquirer during those Depression years. Incidentally, when John Ringling North ascended the management throne of the GSOE in 1938, he returned to his old friends at Strobridge after an approximate 16 year hiatus, among other reforms, but he soon found the printing costs too great. Dick Flint Baltimore