In July 2024, Arts and Humanities Librarian Jill Chisnell received an email from a former colleague from the School of Design, who hadn’t set foot in Hunt Library since 2010.
“There’s an image I need that I cannot find anywhere else,” researcher Sarah Johnson wrote. She recalled that the illustrated advertisement depicted a young man and woman on a farm, contrasted with a well-dressed urban man — and she had been searching for it for over 10 years.
“The image visually defines the mail order history research I have conducted my entire career,” she added. The last time she remembered seeing it was in a collection of advertising industry magazines on the third floor of Hunt Library, during a class she taught while working at CMU.
Chisnell knew that she would no longer find the requested image on the third floor of Hunt. Many of the journals once stored there have since been moved to the Libraries’ offsite storage facility at 6555 Penn Ave. Some were even carefully deaccessioned, repurposed or sent to recycling in order to make room for more relevant resources that are much more frequently requested by researchers today.
So Chisnell put on her detective hat and dove into the search. She knew she’d have to be creative to find answers.
Goal
- Locate an elusive image from an advertising industry publication from the early 1900s.
How We Helped
- Chisnell shared Johnson’s request with Stacks Manager Gloria Henning, who spent 26 years as the periodicals specialist on the third floor. Over the years, she created spreadsheets tracking the print journals shelved on the floor, keeping up with changes as titles were moved or canceled due to low usage or digital availability.
- Henning was able to share collection spreadsheets from 2002, 2003, 2011, and 2013.
- From Henning’s notes, Chisnell identified probable journal titles and took to the internet to search digital archives for the image. She began looking through resources like HathiTrust Digital Library, a collaborative repository featuring content digitized by Google Books, the Internet Archive, and other libraries.
Results
- Chisnell located the image in “Annual of Advertising Art in the United States,” published in 1921. The catalog collected paintings and drawings submitted for the first annual exhibition held by the Art Directors Club at the galleries of the National Arts Club in New York.
- The image, found on page 23, is titled “Rivals,” by J. Chenoweth. It was an advertisement for the Royal Tailors company.
- Johnson was able to use the image as part of her grant-funded article about opposition to urban mail order and department stores in Iowa. “The power in this image for me, personally and professionally, is in how well Chenoweth captured the clash between urban and rural sensibilities so graphically using clothing, drawing on his family’s own rural past in Indiana and the imprimatur of his father’s dry goods business to tell this story,” she said.
