Vintage 1950s-60s Pinup Broom Label 🧹 NOS Sexy Housewife Art Yellow & Navy #87 Kitchen Wall Art

Did a Broom Label Really Stop You Cold? 🧹 This One Will.

Size: 6" x 3 1/2"

I'll admit it: of all the broom labels I've handled, she's the one that makes people laugh out loud. A yellow field that practically glows, a navy band straight across the middle, one big red word, BROOM, and a housewife with bouncing curls and a grin that says the kitchen floor is already done and she's off to the dance. Somebody decided a broom needed a pin-up girl, and honestly, they weren't wrong. That was the whole pitch. It was enough. It was more than enough.

This is new old stock: never wrapped around a broom, never pasted, never used. It carries no brand, no maker and no town, just a small printed 87 in one corner and PRINTED IN U.S.A. along the bottom. That's because she was stock art. A broom maker ordered her by the thousand, by number, and let her do the selling for him.

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🧹 Number 87, and the Wichita House That Sold Her

That little "87" is how she was ordered. Numbered stock broom labels like this one were sold by John L. Denning & Company of Wichita, Kansas, a broom-corn house that got its start in 1924, ran fourteen branches in different states, and at times held 75 to 90 percent of all the broomcorn available in the country. Denning's sample booklet told customers "Order by Number Only" and "Do Not Tear Out These Labels," and it wouldn't take an order for fewer than 1,000 of any one design. The company kept advertising to the broom trade right up until February 1995.

Here's the part I love. Design 87 wasn't always her. The older printings of number 87, the ones whose foot line reads "87 LITHO IN U.S.A.," show a prim Edwardian maid in a mob cap, a red bodice and a long white apron: same yellow field, same navy band, same red BROOM, same number. Then the series was reprinted with the newer "PRINTED IN U.S.A." foot line, and number 87 got a complete makeover. The mob cap went, the curls came in, and the long apron turned into a short halter number. The two of them turn up side by side in one collector's lot of broom labels, the old maid and this gal, both wearing the number 87.

That makeover is what dates her. Denning's booklet carries a "Wichita 1" postal-zone address, which means it was printed between 1943, when postal zones began, and 1963, when ZIP codes replaced them, and every page in it has the old "LITHO IN U.S.A." foot line. The "PRINTED IN U.S.A." wording on this label is the later style, the one that turns up on broom labels imprinted with ZIP codes. So she's a 1950s-60s girl, and one look at that hairdo would have told you as much.

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🌾 Broomcorn, and the Trade Behind the Label

There was a time in America when a broom was not a humble afterthought tucked behind a laundry room door. It was a household essential, a craft product, and a point of genuine regional pride. The raw material, Sorghum bicolor, better known as broomcorn, grew in tall, fibrous stalks whose seed-head brush was harvested by hand, sorted by quality, and bundled into the tight, tapered shapes that broom makers would wind and stitch onto hardwood handles. The quality of the broomcorn determined the quality of the broom. The quality of the broom determined the reputation of the manufacturer. Broom making clustered into regional centers whose makers competed on quality, on branding, and on the vividness of their printed labels.

By the late 19th century whole towns had become home to concentrations of broom manufacturers, many of them family operations and some multi-generational, whose names appeared on labels across the country. A hardware store owner in Ohio or a general mercantile operator in Georgia might never visit the factory, but he recognized the label, and he knew what it meant. The label was the handshake. It was the salesman who never got tired.

The broom industry operated at genuine industrial scale during the first half of the twentieth century. Freight cars loaded with finished brooms moved out on the railroads, distributing product across the eastern seaboard and beyond. The broomcorn itself arrived by rail from the Midwest, where it had been grown on large agricultural operations in Illinois, Kansas, and Oklahoma, and that's exactly why a Wichita broom-corn house was the natural place for a broom maker to buy his labels: the same outfit could sell him the brush and the paper that sold it. The factory towns were the processing centers, the places where raw material became branded, labeled, finished product. Local families worked the trade across generations. Sons learned from fathers. The techniques for winding and stitching broom brush were passed person to person in the workshops, not written down in manuals.

Local legend in the broom towns has it that at the height of the trade, the smell of dried broomcorn, a faintly sweet, grassy, dusty scent, settled over certain neighborhoods on warm afternoons when the factory windows were open, and that longtime residents came to regard it as simply the smell of prosperity. Lore passed down among collectors holds that labels like this survived because production occasionally outpaced demand: labels were printed in anticipation of orders that shifted, or for factories that consolidated, leaving inventory sitting in flat files and storage drawers for decades. With a 1,000-label minimum on every design, it's easy to see how a few hundred of one girl could outlive the broom maker who ordered her. That is the collector's lucky inheritance.

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💄 A Pin-Up on a Broom

By the 1950s the pin-up girl was everywhere in America: on the calendar at the gas station, on matchbook covers and ink blotters, on the wall of every barbershop in town. Putting one on a broom label was a bit of a wink. Here's the most ordinary chore in the house, sold by a girl who looks like she stepped off one of those calendars, and she seems to be in on the joke.

The woman on this label is not a passive figure. She stands with the easy confidence of someone who has been placed at the center of the composition by an illustrator who understood exactly what he was doing. The blue apron and red ruffles balance against the yellow and navy of the label's field with the kind of deliberate complementary tension that a trained commercial artist understood instinctively. Her expression is not coy. It is knowing. She is the product's ambassador and she is entirely comfortable in that role.

The illustrators who produced this kind of work were not fine artists who had condescended to commerce. Many of them were highly skilled commercial draftsmen who understood color, composition, and human anatomy, and who applied those skills to the practical problem of making a product label arrest a shopper's attention at the point of sale. Whoever redrew number 87 succeeded. Completely. She's even turned up on the cover of a modern journal, so I'm not the only one who can't stop smiling at her.

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📄 The Life of a Broom Label, From Press to Closet to Collection

Most broom labels did not survive. They were printed to be used, wound around a handle with a tight paper wrapper or pasted to a card attached to the broom's brush end, and once the broom went into service, the label went with it. It got damp from storage near the back door. It got torn when someone grabbed the broom in a hurry. It faded in the light above the kitchen window. The functional life of a broom label was, in most cases, measured in months before it became illegible or was discarded entirely.

New old stock labels, the ones that never made it onto a broom and stayed in a printer's flat file or a manufacturer's storage drawer, are the survivors. They are what broom labels actually looked like on the day they left the press, before time, moisture, light, and use could compromise them.

The pin-up figure is what takes this one beyond generic broom ephemera. Pin-up illustrated trade labels sit right where advertising ephemera, pin-up art, and kitchen Americana meet. Most broom labels feature text-heavy designs, flowers, birds, or simple brand marks; a full illustrated figure like this is the exception. And this girl in particular is a hard one to find. Finding the old maid version of number 87 is one thing; finding her pin-up replacement is quite another.

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🖼️ Display Ideas

• 🪞 Frame it in a deep-set shadow box: a 1-inch mat in cream or ivory lifts the yellow background and lets the navy band read as a design element rather than simply a color field. Hang it in a kitchen, a butler's pantry, or a breakfast nook where morning light will catch that yellow.
• 🏠 Group it with other mid-century kitchen ephemera: soap labels, flour sack graphics, and seed packets from the same years share a visual vocabulary with this piece. A small gallery wall of three to five framed examples creates a cohesive display that works as both art and history.
• 🗂️ Display it unframed in an archival sleeve on a tabletop easel: a new old stock label in a sleeve has its own appeal for collectors who want to be able to examine both sides and handle the piece without risk. An inexpensive crystal-clear archival sleeve and a small brass easel is a zero-commitment display option.
• 🧺 Pair it with an old corn broom: mounted on a wall bracket alongside the framed label, it creates a display that tells the full story of the object in its original context.
• 🎨 Use it as the anchor piece in a pin-up ephemera collection: alongside calendar pages, matchbook covers, and trade cards featuring similar illustrated figures, this label holds its own as a fine example of mid-century pin-up art applied to a workaday household product.
• 🏡 Install it in a mudroom, laundry room, or utility space: there is a particular pleasure in returning a piece of functional domestic ephemera to a domestic context. A framed broom label in a working mudroom is a small, witty act of historical restoration.

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🎁 Who Collects These

The collector base for a piece like this is genuinely broad, and that breadth is worth understanding because it reflects the multiple layers of meaning packed into a single 6 x 3.5 inch label.

Advertising and trade ephemera collectors pursue printed labels as primary documents of American commercial printing history. For this community, the interest is in the printing itself, the registration and the survival of the original color, as much as in the subject matter. A new old stock example with bright color is the standard they are always chasing.

Pin-up art collectors, a large and passionate community spanning everything from original magazine illustration to die-cut store displays, find pieces like this particularly compelling because pin-up imagery applied to utilitarian household products represents the art form at its most democratic. This was not a specialty publication or a collector's item in its own time. It was a broom label. The fact that it carried this level of illustrated figure work says something about how mainstream the pin-up look had become in American commercial culture by the 1950s.

Local-history collectors have a specific and deep interest in the material culture of the broom industry. Whole regional identities were genuinely shaped by this trade, and surviving materials from that era are primary sources for understanding how manufacturers positioned themselves in the national marketplace.

Kitchen Americana and domestic history collectors seek out objects that illuminate the material culture of the American home at specific historical moments. A broom label featuring a confident, glamorous illustrated homemaker from the 1950s-60s is a complex and interesting document of how domestic labor was visualized and marketed.

Mid-century graphic design enthusiasts collect commercial art for its visual qualities alone: the color palettes, the typography, the compositional conventions of the period. This label's yellow-and-navy field with red accent type is a textbook example of mid-century commercial color applied at the trade-goods level.

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❓ Frequently Asked Questions

What does "New Old Stock" (NOS) mean for a label like this, and why does it matter?

New Old Stock means that this label was printed in the 1950s-60s but was never put into use on an actual broom. It stayed in storage, most likely in a broom maker's stockroom or a supplier's label inventory, from the time it was printed until it surfaced. For paper ephemera, NOS status is the gold standard of condition. Labels that were actually applied to brooms were subject to moisture, tearing, light exposure, and general handling that degraded them rapidly. A NOS label represents the object at its original best, the colors as the printer intended them, the paper uncompromised by the conditions of use.

Is the color really as vivid as it looks in the photographs?

Yes. The yellow background is a warm, saturated yellow that reads almost luminous in person. The navy band is deep and cleanly printed, and the red is true red, not faded toward orange or pink. The NOS condition is the direct explanation for that.

How do you know she's from the 1950s-60s and not the 1920s?

The foot line. Numbered stock labels in this series were printed in two main styles: the older one reads "87 LITHO IN U.S.A.," and that's the style in John L. Denning & Company's sample booklet, which was printed between 1943 and 1963. This label reads "PRINTED IN U.S.A.," the later style that shows up on labels imprinted with ZIP codes, which only began in 1963. And the older printings of number 87 carry a completely different girl, an Edwardian maid in a mob cap, so this pin-up is the redraw that came later.

What is the best way to store or preserve a paper label like this one?

For long-term preservation, archival-quality storage is the standard recommendation among paper ephemera collectors. This means keeping the label in a polypropylene or polyester archival sleeve, never PVC, which off-gasses acids over time, away from direct light, in a stable environment with low humidity. If you display the label rather than storing it, UV-filtering glass or acrylic in a properly sealed frame will significantly reduce the rate of color change from ambient light exposure. Paper that has been in stable storage for sixty-odd years is already well settled, but light and humidity remain the primary ongoing risks. Archival materials are widely available from art supply and museum supply retailers and represent a modest investment relative to the value of the piece.

Is this label appropriate for a kitchen or domestic display context, or is it primarily a collector's-case piece?

It is genuinely both, and many collectors find the most satisfying approach is to display it in a domestic context, properly framed and protected, precisely because that context restores some of the original meaning of the object. A broom label belongs in a house. Framed behind UV-filtering glass and hung in a kitchen, mudroom, or pantry, it reads simultaneously as a piece of commercial art history and as a wry, confident piece of domestic décor. The figure's knowing smile is, if anything, more resonant when she's back in the environment she was designed for. For collectors who prefer a more formal archival presentation, a shadow-box frame with a mat and a backing of archival foam board is the museum-standard approach and works equally well in a study, library, or dedicated collection space.

How rare is this one?

Rare. Most broom labels were used and thrown away, and new old stock is a much smaller subset. Within that, the older maid version of number 87 turns up now and then, but this pin-up version almost never comes up for sale. She's the kind of piece that surfaces in a collection and stays there.