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Size: 6" x 3 1/2"
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Size: 6" x 3 1/2"
Labels were made to be used up. They wrapped broom handles, got scraped on warehouse shelves, and ended up in the trash behind the hardware store, and nobody thought to save them. So when an unused one turns up with its colors still bright and its panels still open, I think it earns a second look. This butterfly label is New Old Stock: it left the press and never reached a broom handle.
This is a vintage 1940s lithographed broom label, a butterfly over a flower rosette with an open panel above and another below, and the only printing besides the picture is a small 92 - LITHO IN U.S.A. at the lower right. Those two blank panels were left for a broom maker to print a company name, a brand or a town, which is the whole idea of a stock label: a finished picture with a space to claim it. Nobody ever filled these in, so the butterfly comes to you complete, a graphic composition that needs nothing added.
It's ordinary commercial lithography, a few flat inks with printed line and dot tints under the butterfly.
That "92" is how 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. The cover of Denning's sample booklet said "Order by Number Only," and the company wouldn't take an order for fewer than 1,000 of any design. The same butterfly shows up among the loose labels in a collector's lot of Denning booklet material.
The little foot line is what dates the printing. A number followed by "LITHO IN U.S.A." is the style on the pages of Denning's booklet, and because the booklet carries a "Wichita 1" postal-zone address, it had to be printed between 1943, when zones began, and 1963, when ZIP codes replaced them. That puts this printing in the 1940s. The art style is no help in dating it, since the same booklet sold an Edwardian lady and a Victorian-style peacock right beside a cartoon bird in 1950s style.
Broom corn, the tall sorghum grown for its stiff, straight fibers, was raised across the American heartland, particularly in Illinois, Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado. It was a cash crop that shaped whole farm communities, and the broom factories that turned it into finished brooms employed thousands of workers in small and mid-sized towns. Wichita had its own broomcorn dealers by 1904, and Denning went on to own, at times, 75 to 90 percent of all the broomcorn available.
On a hardware store shelf, a dozen brooms might hang side by side, priced within pennies of each other and made of essentially the same broom corn, wire and twine. The label was the whole argument for picking one over another. A well-printed label signaled quality and care in a language any shopper could read at a glance, which is why broom makers ordered them by the thousand.
The butterfly had its own logic. Insects, butterflies and bees especially, were popular in domestic product branding because they carried associations of industry, cleanliness and natural order, and a butterfly on a broom suggested lightness and the pleasant efficiency of housekeeping done well.
No artist signed the butterfly and no printer's name appears on the label or in Denning's booklet, so both stay anonymous. The commercial artists behind designs like this sat somewhere between fine artists and mechanical workers: trained in drawing and in what lithography could and couldn't do, and solving a communication problem for a shopper standing three feet from the rack. The best of them were extraordinarily good at it, and this butterfly is a confident piece of that craft. The rosette above it carries the Art Nouveau influence that lingered in American commercial graphics, even as the harder geometry of Art Deco rose beside it.
Advertising ephemera, trade cards, seed packets, cigar labels, crate labels and broom labels among them, has grown from a niche interest into a recognized category of American material culture. These objects preserve what commercial art looked like at the point of sale, in the hardware store and the general mercantile, for the people it was actually aimed at.
Broom labels are among the rarer survivors of the household product labels, because they wrapped round wooden handles that were grabbed and released thousands of times. A seed packet sat in a drawer and a cigar label was glued flat inside a box, but the broom labels that survived mostly did so by accident, packed away in old stock and rediscovered in estate sales and barn clearances. NOS examples like it sit at the top of the condition range, and they are genuinely uncommon.
Vintage broom labels and advertising ephemera draw collectors from several worlds at once. Paper ephemera collectors prize the condition, the NOS status and the printing. Butterfly and natural history art collectors recognize the draftsmanship right away. Americana and folk art collectors value it as a document of the domestic commercial culture of its day, and interior designers working in vintage, farmhouse or cottagecore styles collect labels for their wall presence.
It also makes a gift that needs no explanation: for someone who collects old paper, loves butterflies, or has a wall that needs something genuinely different on it.
NOS stands for New Old Stock, meaning the label was printed and never put to use. It was not applied to a broom handle, never handled across a counter, and never exposed to the wear that leaves most surviving labels faded or damaged. For paper ephemera collectors NOS is the gold standard of condition, because it shows the piece as it was made, with the colors and paper as they left the press. That brightness is not restoration or enhancement.
Yes, and in direct light they are arguably more striking. Lithographic inks sit on the surface of the paper with a particular density and a slight sheen that the camera flattens somewhat. The cobalt blues, deep reds and warm golds have a physical depth in hand.
Nothing is missing. The blank panels are original to the design. This is a numbered stock label: a printer would produce a standard design and offer it to many broom makers, who ordered it by number and then had their own company name, brand and town printed into the open panels as a second step. It was a cost-effective way for a small broom company to get professional lithographic design without commissioning custom artwork. These panels simply never made it to that second step, and for today's collector they read as part of the composition, framing the butterfly cleanly.
For long-term storage, use an acid-free sleeve or folder, flat, in a cool, dry place away from direct light. For display, UV-protective glass or acrylic blocks the wavelengths that do the most damage to paper and lithographic inks, and a float frame or a shadow box with archival backing shows the label beautifully while protecting it from humidity and pollutants. The goal is to keep it the way it has been kept so far: low light, stable temperature and humidity, and no contact with acidic materials.
It is a genuine vintage lithographed label from the 1940s, an original stock printing and not a reprint or a digital facsimile. NOS paper of this type turns up through estate sales and warehouse clearances, places where old stock sits undisturbed for decades.
Both. The butterfly is a finished composition that holds a wall on its own, and most viewers are surprised to learn it started life as a broom label. As a collector's piece it belongs in any collection of American advertising lithography, paper ephemera or insect art. Displaying it well is also caring for it well, as long as you use UV-protective glazing and archival framing materials.
By lithography, which prints from a flat surface that holds ink only where the artist drew. This label is built from a few solid inks plus printed tint patterns, the ruled tint under the butterfly among them. The foot line reads LITHO, and that is exactly what it is.
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Preserving History: Authentic Objects Across Eras
