Vintage Atlas Broom Label 🧹 NOS 1950s Space Age Atomic Globe Planets Stars Mid Century Modern Wall Art Decor

Atlas Broom Label 🌎 Space Age Globe, Stock Design No. 97

Size: 6" x 3 1/2"

An unused Atlas broom label - the globe wrapped in a red ATLAS banner, with stars and a little ringed planet flying around it - and in the margin the design number 97 and PRINTED IN U. S. A. I have a stack, so yours will look just like this one.

🚀 Space Age on a Broom

This one could only come from the Space Age. A broom maker who bought it got the whole mid-century mood in one picture: the globe, the stars, a planet with rings. And the name couldn't have been better timed - Atlas was the rocket that put John Glenn into orbit in February 1962, and before that the Atlas missile had been in the papers since its first flights in 1957. In the old myth, of course, Atlas was the Titan who held up the heavens.

There's a rumor passed around in collector circles that the globes, planets and stars on mid-century broom labels were small broom makers' deliberate bid to ride the Sputnik-era excitement - and the story goes that a lithographer or traveling label salesman would pitch exactly that: put a globe on it, put some stars on it, and make the housewife feel she was buying a piece of the Space Age.

🔢 A Stock Label, Ordered by Number

Like a lot of broom labels, this was sold by its number. Broom makers picked designs out of a label catalog - John L. Denning & Company of Wichita, Kansas sold its numbered labels "by number only," a thousand at a time - and the number line is how you can tell the printings apart. The early booklet labels read "LITHO IN U.S.A."; this spaced-out PRINTED IN U. S. A. with the number off on its own is the later style, the one found on labels that already carry ZIP codes. So this is a mid-century printing, and a fun one.

I haven't found another Atlas label offered anywhere. It's great framed in a kid's room, a rec room, or with any mid-century space stuff.