Garden Catalogs as Americana Part 2

Seedsmen as Printers

Part I on Garden America Catalogs

This magazine was entirely separate from the Park’s Flower Book which was the annual catalog, but every subscriber also got the catalog. Both of these publications came from Park’s own printing press powered by a stream running through a large water wheel under one end of the building. Woodcuts were used almost entirely for illustrating these old magazines, and for the most part they depicted the subjects faithfully. For nearly 50 years these publications were hand addressed before going into the mail, an astounding bit of information in view of what this process would cost today.

George B. Park, son of the founder, believes that over the history of this company the big change has been in the public’s taste. Now the customers want more bloom, more heat resistance, and more easily grown kinds of flowers than they did formerly, he says. The development of the many varieties of F, hybrid petunias has been one answer to this sort of demand.

Henry Field printed his own first catalog, a four-page folder, in 1899. It offered seed potatoes, and strawberry. raspberry, blackberry and asparagus plants. Field used to describe how he worked nights for two weeks to get out a few thousand of these price lists on a hand power press. He told the whole story of how he established his seed company, in a preface to his catalogs.

Within 25 years his catalog and mail-order business had expanded enormously, but this company continued to do its own printing. The catalog now goes to about 1,000,000 prospective customers each spring. It has varied considerably in size and format through its history, but always the trend has been to increase the page size and the amount of color inside. The emphasis has also shifted from vegetables and fruits over to ornamental plants of all kinds.
Henry Field was in step with the boisterous times in the 1920′s when he began to sell truck tires by mail; shoes: hardware; roofing; radios; clothing; house and barn paint: and many other items Midwestern farm families were glad to buy by mail.

Change to Ornamentals

Even in the short history of Hamburg, Iowa’s Inter-State Nursery catalog (first issued in 1931) the shifting interest from fruits to ornamental plants, especially roses, is evident. The largest jump came in 1947 when the front cover subject changed from cherry trees in 1946 to the roses ‘Peace’ and ‘Crimson Glory.’

With the development of polyethylene film as a shipping material a larger amount of space was now devoted to perennials in this catalog as in many others. Packed in this plastic, the plants stand a better chance of reaching the customer in good condition than they formerly did.

For longevity and size, the catalog of the W. Atlee Burpee Co. of Philadelphia probably stands alone in America. It has been published annually since 1876. Last season the firm distributed between four and five million catalogs. For several generations the Burpee catalog has taken its place in millions of American homes each spring, as regularly as the new calendar and the spring almanac.

Stress on Food Crops

In the early days this catalog was known as “Burpee’s Farm Annual.” W. Atlee Burpee, the founder, edited it himself and continued to do so as long as he lived, for 40 years. The first three issues offered only livestock and poultry—no seeds. These were added to the line in 1879, the first year that the catalog was printed by the William F. Fell Co. The Fell Company continued to print Burpee’s catalog for nearly 70 years, and discontinued only when the size of the edition made it necessary to change over to fast rotary presses.

A few vegetable varieties introduced by Burpee in the last century arc still making regular appearanes in this catalog. One of these is ‘Burpee’s Sure-head Cabbage,’ which first appeared around 1880. Another is ‘Burpee’s Bush Lima,’ which came out in 1890. It was the first true large lima bean to have a bush form. Not far behind was ‘Burpee’s Golden Bantam’ sweet corn, in 1902. Yellow sweet corn was decidedly a novelty at that time.

From these yearly Burpee publications, one can get a short history of recent printing progress. At first all the illustrations were wood cuts taken from artists’s drawings. Around 1890 photographic illustrations began to be used, although they still had to be engraved on wood by hand. Burpee’s first color work consisted of lithographed inserts in the catalog issued for 1884. Each color page was printed only on one side, the reverse side being blank. A new tomato and single dahlias were the subjects chosen for this special illustration.

Soon the covers, too, were lithographed in full color. A few halftone illustrations, engraved on metal photographically in the modern way, began to be used about 1901. As these replaced the wood cuts the pages began to look more and more as they do now.

Always the page size of the Burpee catalog has remained practically the same-small enough to fit in a gardener’s pocket. Mr. Burpee liked the small size for another reason, too. He believed that, stacked up with other catalogs, it was quite likely to end at the top of the pile.

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