Antique 1920s “Milady’s Toilet” Lynas Toiletry Brochure 💄 Beauty Catalog from Logansport Indiana

What Did a 1920s Lynas Saleswoman Lay on Your Kitchen Table? 💄 The "Milady's Toilet" Toiletry Brochure, Logansport, Indiana

Size: 10 1/2" x 7 1/2"

Unfold Milady's Toilet and you've got a whole 1920s sales call from Logansport, Indiana in your hands - six printed panels a Lynas lady would spread out on a kitchen table while she went through every jar. This one gets me: the color is bright, the script is gorgeous, and somebody clearly spent real money getting it printed right.

The cover carries the title in flowing red script over an ornate floral border, with a young woman in profile checking her reflection in a hand mirror. Right below the title on the front, Lynas starts with a letter that spells out just how they did business: "Lynas toiletries are not sold in the shops. They can be purchased only from our personal representatives who call at your home, where you may select these intimate articles in privacy." There's the whole business in a nutshell - door to door, one woman to another, and the privacy was the selling point.

What follows is basically a full product catalog. "Choice Toilet Lotions" gets you Princess Rose Lotion, Diana Lemon Lotion, Cream of Almond Lotion and Lady Luxury Toilet Powder. "Lynas Toilet Creams" is a whole page of jars (white glass, the back panel tells you, every one the same capacity as the Creme Gloria jar pictured there) — Dr. Lynas Hair Pomade, Diana Peroxide Cream, Diana Camphorated Cream, Diana Witch Hazel Cream, Dr. Lynas Massage Cream, "Salben or Cold Cream" at fifty cents, Diana Lemon Cleanse, Diana No Wrinkle Cream, Diana Bleaching Cream, Creme Gloria (billed as "a greaseless vanishing cream for the skin"), Diana Lemon Tissue, Diana Cleansing Cream, Diana Tissue Cream and Beauty Cold Cream. "Fine Powders for Milady" adds Lady Luxury Face Powder in its own black-and-gold tin, De La Claire's Powder de Riz American Beauty Face Powder, and Diana talcum. The last panel lines up the Lady Luxury Toilet Water bottle and the Creme Gloria jar "actual size" next to a JBL Toilet Articles shipping box, under the line "Lynas Means Quality."

💌 Page five is why I keep coming back to this one

The page is titled Why Well Groomed Women Prefer Lynas Toiletries, and rather than more sales talk, Lynas ran thirteen real letters from customers, with their names and towns, opening with: "We are in constant receipt of letters from women who have enjoyed the benefits of Lynas toilet preparations. Here are presented a few, selected at random, that will convey to you some idea of the satisfaction you will secure from using these delightful aids to the toilet."

Some of the letters are simple compliments. A few are small stories. Mary Madison of Columbus, Indiana had been buying her Hair Pomade for a year from her local agent, Mrs. Dunn of Columbus, and wrote in that it did "everything that it is claimed, as Mrs. Dunn recommended to me." Then comes the good part: "Before I began using it, I would comb out great combfuls, but since my hair has stopped coming out, my hair has grown so I hardly know myself. I cannot praise your Pomade too much and desire this statement to be published." Mrs. Virgie Holman had been getting her goods from the Lynas agent back in Joplin, Missouri, a Mrs. Alltizer, and didn't think she could get along without her Salben now — so, having just moved to Commerce, Oklahoma, she asked about taking on the agency herself: "I thought I would like to try the agency of your goods here if we could arrange it." Daisy Carter of Evergreen, Alabama wrote in for more Creme Gloria because "your agent here has died" - which tells you this sales force was real women working real routes, and when one was gone, her customers missed her and wrote to the home office themselves. Mrs. Wm. Russell of Russellville, Kentucky said the Lynas perfumes and face powder were "so mild and pleasant that they send forth a perfume like a flower garden," and Miss Mary Lakand of Connersville, Indiana said Salben "made my skin like velvet."

The rest of the page, name by name and town by town: Mrs. Laura Flowers, Mt. Vernon, Ind.; Miss Geneva Parke, Richmond, Ky.; Mrs. T. C. Royce, Maumee, Ohio; Miss Mary Clarke, Richmond, Va.; Mrs. J. L. Kostenbader, Easton, Pa. (fifteen years a customer by the time she wrote); Mrs. D. L. Keen, Judsonia, Ark.; Maurice W. Nye, Pottsville, Pa. — the one man on the page, writing in about Hair Pomade for dandruff; and Mrs. A. J. Hotchkiss, Lincoln, Neb. Thirteen letters, thirteen towns, nine states running from Nebraska to Virginia — which amounts to a map of how far Lynas's door-to-door agents had spread by the time this catalog went to press. It's about the best kind of advertising ephemera there is: a company selling its product by publishing its own customers' voices.

What the page preserves is the thing worth preserving anyway: real names, real small towns, and a business built entirely on a woman knocking on a door.

🏭 Who Lynas actually was

Dr. James B. Lynas was born in 1835 in Dearborn County, Indiana, came to Logansport in 1861, and after a successful medical career started making remedies right in his own home; by 1866 he was compounding his own "family remedies" — a catarrh remedy, a cough syrup, a liniment, a couple of salves — before the business grew into flavorings, soaps, lotions and eventually the perfumes and toilet preparations this catalog is selling. According to a county history from 1913, between fourteen and fifteen hundred people were working for the firm that April, scattered across nearly every state and growing by about sixty a month. The Market Street building that housed it went up around 1910. J.B. died in 1901; his son George H. Lynas ran the company as president until his own death in 1926. It was incorporated in 1904 as Dr. J. B. Lynas & Son, George being the Son, and that "Lynas & Son" is what you'll see printed on most of the jars and bottles in this catalog. By the 1921-22 Logansport city directory the firm was at 521-523 E. Market, listed as "Medicine, Flavoring Extract and Toilet Article Manufacturers," which is the toilet-article side of the house you're holding right here. The family sold the business in 1938, and it was formally dissolved in 1965. Think of it - a little Indiana family company reaching all the way out to farmhouses in Oklahoma and Nebraska for the better part of a hundred years, one saleswoman and one jar of Salben at a time, with Lady Luxury, the powder and toilet-water line in here, one of the names they made along the way.

There's no year printed anywhere, but you can work it out: the opening letter says Lynas had been in business for over fifty years, and the firm goes back to 1866, so it's 1916 or later - and those bobbed, waved hairdos on the cover and the testimonial page are the 1920s through and through.

✅ Condition: new old stock - these come from the same find. These hundred-year-old papers sat folded on a shelf instead of going through the mail. Of the ones I've gone through, not one has tears, writing, or heavy soiling, and the color and script stay sharp on all of them. It displays beautifully framed, propped on an easel, or tucked into a vanity vignette next to a few Lynas bottles or tins if you collect those too.

📏 Measurements

• Closed: approx. 10 1/2" x 7 1/2"

• Open: approx. 21 3/4" x 10 1/4"

• Format: Tri-fold, 6 printed panels

📍 Origin & date

• Maker: Dr. J.B. Lynas & Son (Lynas, the Perfumer) – Logansport, Indiana, USA

• Era: 1920s