{"product_id":"vintage-leader-broom-label-military-soldier-treasures","title":"Vintage 1950s-60s Our Leader Toy Soldier Broom Label 🧹 Art Deco Marching Band Litho NOS Advertising Art #49","description":"\u003ch2\u003eWhat Survives When Everything Was Made to Be Thrown Away? 🎖️\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSize:\u003c\/strong\u003e 6\" x 3 1\/2\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv style=\"max-width:315px;margin:0 auto 20px;\"\u003e\u003cdiv style=\"position:relative;padding-bottom:177.78%;height:0;overflow:hidden;\"\u003e\u003ciframe src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/anyvJz3AWgA\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer;autoplay;clipboard-write;encrypted-media;gyroscope;picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen\u003e\u003c\/iframe\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\n\n\u003cp\u003eThere is a particular kind of wonder that comes over you when you hold something that was never supposed to last. Not a portrait painted for posterity, not a commemorative medallion struck for a veteran's mantelpiece, but a broom label: a rectangle of printed paper meant to be pasted onto a wooden handle, sold to a housewife or a janitor, and swept into oblivion one kitchen floor at a time. The printer who ran it through the press knew it would be destroyed. The shopkeeper who stacked a gross of them in the back knew it too. And yet here it is, crisp and vivid, never having touched a single broom handle in its entire existence.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThat is the quiet miracle of New Old Stock ephemera. This is the \u003cstrong\u003e\"Our Leader\"\u003c\/strong\u003e broom label, NOS, a lithographed piece of American commercial art, and I think it deserves a frame.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🎨 What This Is\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe label is a tall, narrow \u003cstrong\u003e6 x 3.5 inches\u003c\/strong\u003e, sized to wrap neatly around a broom's handle. It was \u003cstrong\u003eprinted in the United States\u003c\/strong\u003e, as its own foot line says, and it is a stock label: the name OUR LEADER is part of the artwork, and the open cream panel near the bottom was left for a broom maker to add a company name, a town or a grade. It never got one.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe condition is \u003cstrong\u003eNew Old Stock (NOS)\u003c\/strong\u003e: it was printed, bundled and never used. It never went to a broom factory, never got trimmed or pasted. Whatever storage kept it safe, the result is a label that presents the way it left the press, with clean margins and no creases. Most broom labels that turn up are used, trimmed or adhesive-backed remnants pulled off old brooms during estate cleanouts. An unused one is a different category of find.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🔢 Ordered by Number, Printed in the 1950s-60s\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThat small \"49\" at the foot is how a broom maker ordered it. Numbered stock labels like this were sold by John L. Denning \u0026amp; 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 these same toy soldiers, with this same \"PRINTED IN U.S.A.\" foot line and number, turn up among the loose labels in a collector's lot of Denning material.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe wording is what dates the printing. The booklet's own 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 look of the art doesn't date it: the same booklet sold an Edwardian lady and a Victorian-style peacock right beside a cartoon bird in 1950s style, so a streamlined Art Deco design was simply stock art that stayed on the shelf.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🥁 The Design: Military Illustration at Its Most Commanding\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe central figure is a \u003cstrong\u003elead marching soldier\u003c\/strong\u003e in full dress uniform, a toy-soldier officer in a tall plumed shako with white cross-straps over his tunic, his hand raised in a salute that is not the casual acknowledgment of a parade-route soldier but the stiff, deliberate, eyes-forward salute of someone who knows he is being watched. Two more soldiers flank him at a reduced scale, with others marching away behind, and rays fan out behind the group as if the central figure were lit from within, the source of the light rather than merely standing in it. The composition is bilateral and perfectly balanced, the way a military review is, by design and by discipline.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAcross the top, arching in heavy black letters, are the two words \u003cem\u003eOUR LEADER\u003c\/em\u003e. It is not \"Our Broom\" or \"Our Brand\" or any of the literal, product-forward names that lesser broom labels carried. It is a claim, a declaration that whatever you are about to sweep your kitchen floor with is led by someone worth following. Whoever chose it understood that aspiration sells harder than description, and that a household product named after a heroic abstraction will outlast one named after its function.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🏭 The Broom Label Industry: A Lost American Commercial Art Form\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAmerican broom manufacturing was a genuinely significant domestic industry, centered heavily in the Midwest, particularly in Illinois, where \u003cstrong\u003eArcola\u003c\/strong\u003e earned the informal designation \"Broom Corn Capital of the World,\" but with production facilities and regional jobbers scattered across the country from New England mill towns to the Great Plains communities where broomcorn was grown as a cash crop. The trade supported an entire ecosystem: broomcorn brokers, wire and twine manufacturers, wooden handle mills and, critically for our purposes, the commercial lithography shops that produced the labels, hangtags and wrappers that gave each manufacturer's product its shelf identity.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eBroom labels occupy a fascinating niche as a collecting category precisely because they were produced with such consistent graphic ambition for a product so aggressively utilitarian. The competition on a hardware store shelf full of nearly identical brooms was entirely visual, and the people who designed these labels knew it. The result was an arms race of color, imagery and naming that produced some of the most vivid small-format commercial art in the store. Military themes were especially popular, because martial imagery carried connotations of discipline, reliability and authority that translated well to a domestic cleaning product. A broom that marched, that saluted, that led: that was a broom you could trust.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe economics of the stock label made all of this possible. A printer ran a strong central design in bulk and left room for each customer's name, and a small broom company could order the design by number and have its own name added, getting professional lithography without commissioning custom artwork. No printer's name appears on the label or on Denning's booklet, so the press and the artist stay anonymous, and the surviving labels are their work.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🖼️ Display Ideas\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003cul\u003e\n \u003cli\u003e🪖 \u003cstrong\u003eFrame it solo in a deep shadowbox\u003c\/strong\u003e with a navy or gold mat. The tall 6 x 3.5 inch format sits comfortably in a 5 x 7 opening with a generous border, and the rays fan outward into the negative space.\u003c\/li\u003e\n \u003cli\u003e🥁 \u003cstrong\u003eGroup it with other American military ephemera\u003c\/strong\u003e, such as patriotic trade cards or marching band sheet music covers, in a gallery wall arrangement organized around a red, white and blue palette.\u003c\/li\u003e\n \u003cli\u003e🏛️ \u003cstrong\u003eLean into the Art Deco look\u003c\/strong\u003e by pairing it with other geometric, sunburst-motif pieces, a Deco tin or a period magazine cover, letting \"Our Leader\" anchor the display as its smallest and most concentrated example of the style.\u003c\/li\u003e\n \u003cli\u003e🎨 \u003cstrong\u003eUse it as part of a commercial art study display\u003c\/strong\u003e alongside other NOS labels, such as fruit crate labels, cigar bands and seed packets, to show the range of the lithographer's art across product categories.\u003c\/li\u003e\n \u003cli\u003e📚 \u003cstrong\u003eArchive it in a Mylar sleeve in a flat file\u003c\/strong\u003e if display isn't your immediate plan. NOS paper this clean deserves acid-free storage and a stable environment.\u003c\/li\u003e\n \u003cli\u003e🏠 \u003cstrong\u003eDisplay it in a vintage-themed kitchen, mudroom or entryway\u003c\/strong\u003e, where its original domestic context resonates. There is something deeply right about a broom label displayed near the space it was designed for, elevated now to wall art rather than discarded as packaging.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🎁 Who Collects These\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe collector universe for a piece like this is wider than you might expect. At the center are \u003cstrong\u003epaper ephemera specialists\u003c\/strong\u003e, people who understand lithography as a fine art medium and collect advertising labels across all categories with the rigor a fine art collector brings to prints. For them NOS condition is the decisive factor, and a broom label is valued on the same terms as a cigar label or a seed packet: as an example of the printer's art in its ideal state.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAlongside them are \u003cstrong\u003eArt Deco collectors\u003c\/strong\u003e, who recognize in the sunburst and bold letterforms the same visual grammar they find in Deco poster art and streamlined industrial design. For them the label's scale is part of its appeal, a concentrated, affordable, displayable piece of a visual style that is otherwise represented by large and expensive objects.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eMilitary and patriotic Americana collectors\u003c\/strong\u003e are a third community, particularly those who focus on marching band and dress uniform imagery and on the way American commercial culture absorbed military iconography in peacetime. The \"Our Leader\" soldier is not a combat figure. He is a parade figure, a figure of national pride rather than national crisis, and that places him in a specific and beloved niche.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFinally there are \u003cstrong\u003edecorator-collectors\u003c\/strong\u003e, people who want a piece of vivid, authentic American commercial art for a wall without paying fine art prices, and who will frame it, hang it, and answer \"where did you get that?\" with a story worth telling. Those are the people this label was always going to end up with.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e❓ Frequently Asked Questions\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003ch3\u003eWhat exactly does \"NOS\" mean, and how does it affect the value of this label?\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNOS stands for New Old Stock, meaning the item was manufactured but never used for its intended purpose. In the case of this broom label, it was printed, warehoused and never applied to a broom handle. It has not been trimmed, pasted, soaked off or handled commercially. A NOS example represents the item as the printer intended it to look, on paper that hasn't been compromised by adhesive or humidity.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3\u003eHow was it printed?\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBy lithography, which prints from a flat surface that holds ink only where the image was drawn. This is ordinary commercial lithography: a handful of flat inks, with the pink of the faces and the soft tones built from fine dot screens. The \"LITHO\" and \"PRINTED\" wording in the foot lines of this numbered series describes exactly that.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3\u003eHow should I store or display this label to preserve it long-term?\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf you're framing it for display, the most important considerations are UV-filtering glazing, acid-free matting and backing, and keeping it out of direct sunlight and away from humidity fluctuations. A deep shadowbox gives the best presentation while keeping the label from touching the glazing. If you're archiving, a Mylar (polyester) sleeve, not a PVC sleeve, which off-gasses over time, in a flat file or archival box with acid-free tissue is the preferred method.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3\u003eWhat is the significance of the \"Our Leader\" name, and was it a regional brand or a national one?\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe name is part of the stock art, so any broom maker who ordered design 49 got a label reading OUR LEADER, with room to add their own name in the open panel. That fits the naming habits of the broom trade, where regional and national makers competed with aspirational, patriotic and character-driven brand names such as \"Old Reliable\" and \"Eagle Brand\" rather than company names, sometimes regionally and sometimes by several makers at once. What is certain is that the name was chosen for its authority and its implied promise: this broom leads, this broom is the one worth following.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3\u003eWhat is the size, and how does it fit into standard framing options?\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe label measures \u003cstrong\u003e6 x 3.5 inches\u003c\/strong\u003e, a tall, narrow vertical format. A 5 x 7 inch frame with a mat opening slightly smaller than the label gives a clean, gallery-style presentation with good border space, and an 8 x 10 frame with an adjustable mat gives even more breathing room, which suits the design. For a shadowbox, standard 5 x 7 or 4 x 6 shadowbox frames will accommodate the label comfortably, and a navy or gold mat is particularly effective.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3\u003eWhat do the \"PRINTED IN U.S.A.\" line and the number 49 mean?\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe \"49\" is the design number a broom maker ordered by, and the \"PRINTED IN U.S.A.\" is the foot-line wording of the later printings of that numbered series, where earlier pages read \"LITHO IN U.S.A.\" Together they tie the label to the numbered stock series sold by John L. Denning \u0026amp; Company of Wichita, Kansas, and they are why it dates to the 1950s-60s.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch3\u003eWhat other types of collectors or collections does this label complement?\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe crossover appeal is broad. For \u003cstrong\u003eArt Deco collectors\u003c\/strong\u003e, the sunburst geometry and bold typography fit alongside period posters and streamlined objects. For \u003cstrong\u003emilitary and patriotic Americana collectors\u003c\/strong\u003e, the dress uniform imagery, the saluting figure and the name connect to a rich tradition of martial iconography in peacetime commercial art. For \u003cstrong\u003eadvertising and trade card collectors\u003c\/strong\u003e, it is lithography at full commercial confidence. For \u003cstrong\u003ebroom and domestic tool collectors\u003c\/strong\u003e, a specialized but devoted community, it is NOS, unused and beautifully designed. And for anyone who loves a vivid, authentic American object with a story attached, it is something made to be thrown away that chose, stubbornly and magnificently, not to be.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"relatedBlock\"\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e🔎 More From The Vintage \u0026amp; Antique Gifts Archive\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/vintage-bluebird-broom-label-blue-birds-treasures-gifts\"\u003eVintage 1950s-60s Bluebird Broom Label 🐦 NOS Blank Panel Commercial Lithography Art Nouveau #95\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/antique-mity-fine-broom-label-treasures-gifts-home\"\u003eAntique 1935 Mity Fine Broom Label 🧹 Art Deco Swan NROG Chicago Grocers Advertising - NOS Litho Paper Ephemera\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/vintage-1940s-rose-broom-label-treasures-gifts-home-gifts\"\u003eVintage 1940s Rose Broom Label 🌹 New Old Stock No. 7 | Yellow \u0026amp; Blue Floral Litho Art\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Vintage and Antique Gifts","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40769803878565,"sku":"VAG-7034838450341","price":7.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0597\/2718\/4037\/files\/il_fullxfull.3297813587_tgex.jpg?v=1785354618","url":"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/vintage-leader-broom-label-military-soldier-treasures","provider":"Vintage and Antique Gifts","version":"1.0","type":"link"}