Prints & Posters

1935 Sheldon-Claire Co. Work Incentive Posters

Appraisal: 1935 Sheldon-Claire Co. Work Incentive Posters

Transcript

GUEST: I brought in these antique posters, which I believe to be from the Great Depression. I guess the story behind them is that my father, his father, he owned this store in Plainfield, New Jersey, and I guess he collected them and he put them in an attic. My grandfather was known for wrapping everything in a little bow. My dad, when he went to go visit a few years ago, he went up there and he found these. He brought them back to Santa Fe and he gave them to me, and now I'm here.

APPRAISER: They're, first and foremost, very colorful.

GUEST (chuckling): Yeah.

APPRAISER: These posters are all from 1935.

GUEST: Yes.

APPRAISER: And what they are is a genre of posters that are called work incentive posters. This is a tradition of posters that began in the 1920s with a company called Charles Mather. These were printed in Chicago by the Sheldon-Claire Company. The historical record says the company began in the 1930s. Nobody really knows when they began. Their work became very prominent during the Second World War, when they worked for the government. So these posters from 1935 are the earliest posters from this company that we've seen, and helps actually give us some knowledge as to when the company was founded. And this is a series of posters that were aimed for traveling salesmen or for salesmen.

GUEST: Mm.

APPRAISER: And so each one of these is instilled with an image that would have gone up in businesses to impress upon their salesmen how they could be better salesmen. And I think the first one that says it the best is this one: "Doorknobs!"

GUEST: (laughs)

APPRAISER: Like, what? A poster about doorknobs? But they're basically saying, "Turn more and you'll sell more." The more people you see, the more businesses you go in to visit, the more money you'll earn.

GUEST: Mm-hmm.

APPRAISER: The one next to you: "Winning an argument may lose a sale." If you argue for the sake of argument, you may lose the sale. So it's basically telling the salesmen, "Don't argue, just get out there and sell." "Go-getters mix leg power with brain power. Get organized, let's go." And that image is great, because it shows the salesman. He's all ready to go. He's got his fist clenched and sort of laying down are these lazy, do-nothing salesmen. My favorite of all of these is this one, with an image of Rodin's "Thinker." "Thought is essential to business development. The thinker wins." And this is a great image. It's got Zeppelins and airplanes, cityscapes in the background, these wonderful Art Deco representations of modes of transportation. How many of these do you have in total?

GUEST: I have about 40, but the other ones are pretty, um, mangled and kind of distressed.

APPRAISER: As I counted, in total, you brought 17 with you today.

GUEST: I brought 17 with me today, yes.

APPRAISER: The way these were used is, they were distributed on a weekly basis.

GUEST: Mm.

APPRAISER: And some of them have numbers on the bottom. So, for example, number ten, and you see number 31 there and number 16, those would have been the weeks. So there would have been 52 of these in the series, one for every week in the year.

GUEST: Oh, wow. It's really interesting to me that they're all men in the posters. There's no women, there's no feminism. It's all just "manly man, go, go, go."

APPRAISER: Like it or not, back then, the workforce was mostly men. That is a snapshot of the 1930s American working class.

GUEST: Oh, yeah.

APPRAISER: What do you think these are worth?

GUEST: I think, in total, like, the whole collection is worth about $500.

APPRAISER: One of the things a salesman would be told is that the customer is always right.

GUEST: Yeah.

APPRAISER: So it would behoove me to tell you that you're right.

GUEST: Oh.

APPRAISER: But it's my job as an appraiser to tell you you're wrong.

GUEST: Oh! (chuckles)

APPRAISER: That's not what they're worth. In fact, they're worth almost that much each.

GUEST: Each?

APPRAISER: At auction, I would estimate these between $400 and $600 each.

GUEST (laughing): Wow. I, I did not ev... I couldn't even imagine that.

APPRAISER: And so for the 17 that you brought in, the total for that is between $6,800 and $10,200.

GUEST (laughs): For those 17. Wow, that's crazy. I'm shocked, actually.

APPRAISER: I've never seen these images before...

GUEST: (laughs)

APPRAISER: ...so as far as I'm concerned, these are a particularly rare set of posters. So if the price were to go up a little bit, it wouldn't surprise me.