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Size: 5" x 3 1/2"
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Size: 5" x 3 1/2"
At some point American manufacturing did something quietly extraordinary. It dressed up the ordinary. Hardware store shelves became small galleries of color and ambition, and the humble broom, that most ancient of household tools, got its own poster. Not a painting, not an advertisement in a magazine, but a lithographed label so sharp and so deliberately modern in its geometry that it could hold its own on a gallery wall today. This is one of those labels, and it survived unused.
There is a particular feeling that comes over collectors when they hold a piece of New Old Stock. It's not quite the feeling of holding something old. It's the feeling of holding something that never got to be used: all that intention, all that printing craft and commercial hope, kept in a storeroom drawer while the world moved on without it. A label that was printed, stacked, bundled and forgotten, and because it was forgotten, it survived.
This is a vintage Black Beauty broom label, New Old Stock (NOS), a stock label printed in the 1950s-60s. It measures roughly 5 inches tall by 3.5 inches wide, small enough to fit in your hand and large enough to command attention when framed. It was never applied to a broom handle; it is unused, in the condition it left the printer.
It's a keystone design, that tapered, architectural shield shape Art Deco designers loved for its visual weight and authority, with lightning-style border lines and the words BLACK BEAUTY across the bottom, and a blank oval at the center left open for a broom maker's name. The effect is less "cleaning supply label" and more "small Art Deco travel poster." It was produced by commercial lithography, and the small print at the foot reads PRINTED IN U.S.A. with the number 117.
That "117" is a design number, the way a broom maker ordered it. Numbered stock labels like this were sold by John L. Denning & Company of Wichita, Kansas, a broom-corn house that began in 1924 and grew to fourteen branches in different states. Denning's sample booklet said "Order by Number Only" on the cover and wouldn't take an order for fewer than 1,000 of any design, and this label's foot line follows the pattern of that numbered series. A broom maker picked a number, had his own name printed in the blank oval, and sold his brooms under a name of his own.
The wording is what dates the printing. The booklet's pages read "NN LITHO IN U.S.A.," and because the booklet carries a "Wichita 1" postal-zone address, it was printed between 1943, when zones began, and 1963, when ZIP codes replaced them. "PRINTED IN U.S.A." is the later wording in the series, the one that turns up on imprints carrying ZIP codes, and that puts this printing in the 1950s-60s. The Deco look of the design doesn't tell you the date: the same booklet sold an Edwardian lady and a Victorian-style peacock right beside a cartoon bird in 1950s style, so an Art Deco keystone was simply stock art that stayed on the shelf.
The American broom industry has roots that run surprisingly deep. By the late nineteenth century, broom corn, a variety of sorghum grown specifically for its stiff, fibrous seed heads, had become a legitimate agricultural and industrial commodity across the Midwest and South. Illinois in particular became synonymous with broom manufacturing, and towns like Arcola earned the informal title of "Broom Corn Capital of the World." Factories hired skilled broom sewers, handle turners and wire wrappers, and the finished brooms moved through a distribution network of hardware stores, general stores and dry goods merchants across the country.
What most people forget is that before broadcast advertising, the label was the marketing department. A broom company couldn't run a television spot. What it could do was print a label so striking that the shopkeeper would display the broom head-out and the customer would pick that broom over an unlabeled competitor because it looked like it meant business. The name mattered too. Black Beauty echoes Anna Sewell's beloved 1877 novel about a noble horse, and it carried connotations of strength, grace, loyalty and durability, a name designed to make a housewife feel she was choosing quality.
The keystone shape was no accident either. The keystone, the central wedge-shaped stone of an arch, is the piece that holds everything together. It bears the load. Art Deco designers embraced it because it communicated stability and modernity at once, and commercial lithographers working on product labels adapted it readily.
The word "lithography" comes from the Greek for stone writing, and in its earliest commercial form that is exactly what it was: an image drawn in greasy crayon on a flat limestone slab, treated so that oil-based ink stuck to the drawn areas and was repelled by the dampened blank stone. Commercial printing evolved into a sophisticated industrial process, but the principle held: ink only where the image was drawn, printed from a flat surface. A label like this is built from a few solid inks, each with its own plate and its own pass through the press, with the edges registered to line up.
The result, if the presswork was good, was crisp edges and dense, stable color, and the labels aged well. Museums and design schools collect original labels because the originals show students something a digital reproduction cannot: the actual texture and the way color behaves when it is laid down in physical layers. Because it is NOS and was never glued to a handle and exposed to years of handling and humidity, it retains that vividness in full.
Consider the odds against a label's survival. It was printed as a consumable, a piece of commercial packaging meant to be stripped from a stack, applied to a wooden handle with paste, and discarded along with the used-up broom. Of the hundreds or thousands of Black Beauty labels that left the printer, almost all are gone. They swept floors. They were thrown away.
NOS survivorship almost always comes down to a single human decision: someone, at some point, simply did not use the last of the stock. A hardware store ordered more labels than it needed and tucked the extras in a back-room drawer. A broom company closed its doors and someone swept the remaining supplies into a box rather than the trash. A warehouse was cleared out decades later by someone who recognized, however dimly, that the old paper was too pretty to throw away.
Lore passed down among paper ephemera collectors holds that a significant portion of surviving NOS broom and cleaning product labels came out of hardware store estate sales in the Midwest during the 1970s and 1980s, when a generation of longtime proprietors finally closed shops that had been in families for fifty or sixty years. The back rooms of those stores, undisturbed for decades, turned out to be accidental time capsules, full of stock that hadn't sold or hadn't been used or had been saved because someone liked the look of it. Local legend among Illinois broom trade historians has it that certain labels were kept deliberately by print shop foremen as samples of their best work, proud evidence of what their presses could do. Whether this label came out of a hardware store back room, a print shop sample drawer or a broom factory's own overrun, the condition speaks for itself.
The world of paper ephemera collecting is broader and more passionate than most people outside it realize. Broom labels, cleaning product labels, seed packet labels and hardware store packaging occupy a specific and increasingly valued niche within it, collected by people who understand that commercial printing of this kind is a genuine American folk art tradition, anonymous in authorship, deeply skilled in execution, and almost entirely lost to ordinary use.
Graphic design collectors and historians seek out pieces like this as primary source material. The Art Deco vocabulary here, the keystone, the lightning borders, the bold sans-serif lettering, is textbook, in the best sense: it's what the style actually looked like, not a reproduction or an homage. Americana and general store collectors are drawn to the specificity of the domestic world these labels represent, a world of hardware store shelves, household routines and brand loyalties that has vanished. Lithography and printing history enthusiasts value NOS labels as the finest surviving examples of the craft, unused and undamaged. And interior designers and stylists working in vintage, maximalist or eclectic aesthetics have discovered old labels as some of the most affordable, authentic and visually striking wall art available.
And then there are the collectors who simply love beautiful things with stories. This label is both.
NOS stands for New Old Stock, meaning the label was manufactured but never used for its intended purpose. It was never applied to a broom handle with paste or adhesive and has not been exposed to the handling, humidity and wear of normal use. NOS paper ephemera can survive in remarkable condition precisely because it spent its existence in storage rather than in service. What you see is what came off the press, preserved by accidental inaction rather than deliberate conservation effort.
Yes. The vividness is real, and it has two explanations. First, this is NOS stock: the label has never been glued to a surface, exposed to sustained light or handled repeatedly, so the original ink colors have not faded or degraded. Second, commercial lithography used dense, pigment-based inks that were inherently rich and stable. The depth and saturation collectors describe when they hold pieces like this is a function of the printing process itself.
At approximately 5 inches tall by 3.5 inches wide, the label fits several standard frame sizes. A 5x7 frame with a cut mat opening slightly smaller than the label is a classic approach: the mat creates breathing room and elevates the label from "paper on a wall" to "framed artwork." A 4x6 frame with a minimal mat is a more intimate option that suits a shelf or a small gallery wall. Black, gold or natural wood frames all work, and an acid-free mat board will protect the paper over time.
It is genuinely both, and that dual identity is part of its appeal. The Art Deco look sits happily beside period posters, streamline-style product advertisements and other packaging graphics, and as a collector's piece it is an NOS example of American lithographic printing, which is precisely what serious paper ephemera collectors seek out. Whether your interest is decorative or archival, the label delivers.
The name is part of the stock art, so any broom maker who ordered design 117 received a label reading BLACK BEAUTY, with the blank oval left for their own name. That fits the broom trade, where many regional makers used evocative, unregistered names that were never formally trademarked and whose company records often haven't survived, so it is entirely possible that more than one maker used the name in different markets. "Black Beauty" had obvious appeal, drawn from Anna Sewell's novel, with its connotations of strength, elegance and trustworthiness that translated naturally to a cleaning implement.
Paper ephemera is happiest in stable, dry, low-light conditions. Store it flat, never rolled or folded, in an acid-free sleeve or between sheets of acid-free tissue. Keep it away from direct sunlight and from areas with significant humidity swings, like bathrooms or exterior walls in cold climates. Archival polyester sleeves (Mylar) are the preferred option, since some ordinary plastics off-gas chemicals that can affect paper over time.
The graphic design community has increasingly recognized American commercial lithography as a legitimate art historical tradition, one that produced genuinely sophisticated work by anonymous craftspeople operating under real commercial constraints. At the same time, the supply of high-quality NOS paper ephemera is finite and slowly declining as pieces are absorbed into collections, framed and hung, or simply lost. And culturally there is a growing appetite for objects made by hand and by craft, objects that carry the evidence of their making in their texture and color and that represent a moment in American life that is gone.
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