The Trade Calendar of 1885, produced by Norris & Cokayne Manufacturing Stationers & Printers, decorated the walls of companies that would one day require the manufacturer’s expertise in printing. This work of design features an exotic, oriental motif in which the calendar itself plays a mere secondary role to the manufacturer’s pride in its craft. The use of this foreign motif represents a Western obsession with the highly developed cultures of the East. “The love for Eastern curiosities is as old as Western civilization,” and Western societies have sought to bring in these foreign and exotic beauties into the reaches of everyday life, exemplified by the Trade Calendar.
The calendar features a pallet of primary and neutral colors, each color printed separately like woodblock prints. The contrasts provided by this set of bold colors accentuate the exotic nature of the design. A geometric border surrounds the contents of the print: the illustrations on top, the calendar in the middle, and the prominent logo of Norris & Cokayne at the bottom. The illustrations feature colorful lotus flowers, a dragon surrounded by an
orb, a scroll of foreign characters and the title “KALENDAR 1885” in decorative text. The calendar itself is compressed in order to make room for the illustrations and the logo, and the days of the year are listed vertically, just as writing is in the East.
The Trade Calendar is an object that most businesses will display yearlong, unlike the many examples of disposable and temporary ephemera presented in chapters six and seven of Drucker and McVarish’s Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide. In contrast to the calendar, we can observe the function and features of another work of design created in 1845: a poster advertising Honoré de Balzac’s Petites Misères de la Vie Conjugale. This poster was a public piece of design to be pasted on street corners, occupying spaces as long as competing advertisements allow. The relatively temporary nature of this example did not require the careful alignment, inking and printing required of Norris & Cokayne’s calendar. The poster features broad areas of each color so that subtle misalignments in printing would not impair the overall image. The print, as a piece of advertising,
was probably produced with the intention of minimizing production costs and time, leading to lower quality paper and inks than that of the Trade Calendar. The printers of the poster had to opt for faster and more efficient ways of printing rather than focusing on details, and while the Trade Calendar boasts and advertizes its manufacturer, the Balzac poster displays its maker in illegible and faint print at the bottom right corner.
The illustration that occupies most of Balzac’s poster depicts the story of the publicized novel in which a married man struggles to support his “idle wife” while his children cling to him wreaking havoc. The average adult could easily read this illustration and perhaps relate to any of the characters within. This ability to relate to an image is crucial to the success of public advertisements because they must draw in passersby with not much more than a glance. Just as the familiar content in the temporary poster immediately attracts passerby, the contrasting, unfamiliar content of the yearlong trade calendar attracts Western viewers and draws them in (Pieters, Warlop, Wedel, 773). While the
two examples utilize different advertisement tools to appeal to viewers, both successfully display information: the release of a new Balzac novel and the skills of a certain printing company.
Drucker, Johanna & Emily McVarish. Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide. New Jersey: Person Prentice Hall, 2009. p.118, 140.
Clay Lancaster. “Oriental Forms in American Architecture 1800-1870.” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Sep., 1947), pp. 183-193
Rik Pieters, Luk Warlop and Michel Wedel. “Breaking Through the Clutter: Benefits of Advertisement Originality and Familiarity for Brand Attention and Memory” Management Science, Vol. 48, No. 6 (Jun., 2002), pp. 765-781