Scrapbook of print specimens and proofs compiled circa 1852-circa 1876 probably by a printer associated with the Philadelphia lithographic firm Stein & Jones. Contains book and periodical plates and illustrations; sheet music covers; proof prints; collecting cards; trade cards (several glossed); bank notes, checks, billheads, and receipts; certificates; advertising calendars; and chromolithographed labels and scraps. Commercial ephemera document primarily Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago businesses and organizations, including banks, printers, and art supply dealers.
Majority of contents include several plates from religious texts published in Philadelphia such as Albert Barnes’s "Scenes and Incidents in the Life of the Apostle Paul” (Philadelphia, 1869); illustrations and plates from children and gift books, and periodicals, including from "Peterson’s Magazine" (plates engraved by Illman Brothers); and several works printed by Stein & Jones and Cincinnati lithographers Klauprech & Menzel and Ehrgott & Fobriger. Also includes portraits of lithographers Rudolph Stein and Alfred Jones and color printed and numbered proof lithographs after plates in McKenney & Hall's "History of the Indian Tribes of North America."