Vintage 1950s-60s Bluebird Broom Label 🐦 NOS Blank Panel Commercial Lithography Art Nouveau #95

Why Is the Big Oval Blank? 🐦 Vintage Bluebird Broom Label, NOS Lithograph, 1950s-60s

Size: 6" x 3 1/2"

🐦 The big oval at the top of this label is empty on purpose. It was left for a broom maker's name, which never came, and the label never went on a broom and never left the stack. What it kept is a bluebird on a branch hung with red berries, and the small print of the trade that made it: the number 95 in one corner and PRINTED IN U.S.A. in the other. It is new old stock from the 1950s-60s, carrying a bird whose meaning had already traveled from a Moscow stage to Broadway, the movies and a hit record.

The Label

The label measures 6 x 3.5 inches and stands taller than it is wide, a bluebird perched on a branch among leaves and berries, beak open, beneath a large blank oval in an Art Nouveau frame of curving bands. In the lower left corner is the printed number 95; in the lower right, PRINTED IN U.S.A. The back is plain paper with the picture faintly showing through. It is new old stock, printed and never applied to a broom.

The Empty Oval

A label like this was stock art. The picture, the border and the blank panel came off the press together, and a broom maker could put his own business name into the open space before the labels went onto his brooms. That let one bright design serve many small shops, each of which could make it its own. The oval on this label stayed empty, which is exactly what makes it useful today: a genuine vintage label with room for a name, a date or a shop of your own.

Ordered by Number, Printed in the 1950s-60s

The little "95" is how a broom maker ordered it. Numbered stock labels like this were sold by John L. Denning & Company of Wichita, Kansas, whose sample booklet said "Order by Number Only" on the cover and wouldn't take an order for fewer than 1,000 of any design. This same bluebird exists in two printings: one reads "95 - LITHO IN U.S.A.," the style on the pages of Denning's booklet, and the other, like this label, carries the later wording. The booklet carries a "Wichita 1" postal-zone address, so it was printed between 1943, when zones began, and 1963, when ZIP codes replaced them, and the later wording is the one found on imprints carrying ZIP codes. That puts this printing in the 1950s-60s.

The look of the art doesn't tell you the date. Denning's booklet sold an Edwardian lady and a Victorian-style peacock right beside a cartoon bird in 1950s style, and a bluebird in an Art Nouveau frame was simply stock art that stayed on sale.

Broomcorn Country

Every corn broom started as broomcorn, a sorghum grown for its long, stiff brush, and for most of the twentieth century it was a serious crop. American farms grew 52,242 tons of raw broomcorn in 1915, and production averaged about 41,000 tons a year for the next half century. By one count the country once held 1,500 broom shops turning out 45 million brooms. The work had been partly mechanized since the invention of a broom sewing machine in 1869, and in 1910 Gustaf W. Hanson of Marquette, Kansas received the first patent for a broomcorn knife.

The crop built whole local economies. Broomcorn came to Baca County, Colorado in 1887, and D. J. Greathouse began growing it there the following year. By 1929 Baca County was said to produce 12 percent of the national crop, and in 1949 it had 377 farms growing nearly 75,000 acres. In 1951 the Baca County harvest needed some 1,200 workers. Out of Wichita, Kansas, the John L. Denning Co., the company behind the numbered stock labels, was founded in 1924 and ran 14 branches in different states and at times owned 75 to 90 percent of all the broomcorn on the market.

The Bluebird of Happiness

The bird on this label came with a meaning attached. The bluebird as a sign of happiness turns up in folklore in many cultures, but in the English-speaking world it took hold through a play. Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird opened on September 30, 1908 at Konstantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre and reached Broadway in 1910. In it Tyltyl and Mytyl, the children of a poor woodcutter, are sent by the Fairy Bérylune to search the world for the Blue Bird of Happiness, and after all their adventures they find it in their own backyard. The words "bluebird of happiness" never appear in the play, but the phrase grew out of it. A silent film version followed in 1918. In 1934 Sandor Harmati wrote the song "Bluebird of Happiness," with words by Edward Heyman, for his friend Jan Peerce, the tenor at Radio City Music Hall, and Peerce's 1945 recording became one of the best-selling records ever made by an opera singer. By 1939 bluebirds were flying over the rainbow in The Wizard of Oz, and a bluebird on a broom label carried that meaning with it.

What Changed

The broom trade that used labels like this came apart in the second half of the century. Mexican broomcorn began arriving in 1965, 2,400 tons in the first year. Plastic brooms made their mark around 1967, and wall-to-wall carpeting cut into broom sales through the next decade. American broomcorn production fell below 1,000 tons by 1974. In 1971 the Pueblo Chieftain crowned Baca County the "Broomcorn Capital of the World," and by 1978 the county's last broomcorn crops were sold mostly for flower arrangements. NAFTA, which took effect in 1994, phased out what tariff protection was left. The small shops that once ordered printed labels by the thousand disappeared along the way, which is why an unused one like this has become a piece of everyday American art worth framing.

Good For

• A small frame for a kitchen, laundry room or mudroom
• Bird lovers and bluebird collections
• Personalizing the blank oval with a name or date for a gift
• Broom label and advertising collectors
• Junk journals and scrapbooks

Questions People Ask

Why is the top panel blank?

It was left open for a broom maker's name. This label was never assigned to a maker, so the oval stayed empty.

How big is the label?

6 x 3.5 inches.

How old is it?

It is a 1950s-60s printing from the Denning numbered stock series, and it is new old stock, never applied to a broom.

What is printed on it besides the picture?

The number 95 in the lower left corner and PRINTED IN U.S.A. in the lower right.

Where does the "bluebird of happiness" come from?

The idea is old and widespread, but the phrase grew out of Maurice Maeterlinck's 1908 play The Blue Bird, in which two children search the world for the bird of happiness and find it at home.