About the Waxman Collection

The Waxman Collection of Food and Culinary Trade Cards comprises approximately 6,500 printed advertising cards dating from the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Built to help preserve the history of food and drink in this period, the collection covers the entire range of products and services from field to table. Among its subjects are agriculture, food processing and food distribution, cookery in both home and restaurants, kitchen equipment, tableware, views on food and health, and many related sectors of domestic life. Although the collection consists mainly of American material, the emergence of international corporations and the massive expansion of global trade at this time are evident in a substantial number of cards from France and Germany (which produced some very early printed examples), as well as some cards from Spain, Italy, and Britain.

The collection was assembled by Nahum (Nach) Waxman, ’58 and founder of Kitchen Arts & Letters, a well-known and widely respected New York City bookstore specializing in the literature of food and drink. In 2015, Nach and Maron Waxman donated the collection to Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, where it has joined other rich collections of rare books and archives on the history of food, gastronomy, cooking agriculture, and winemaking. It is hoped that these materials will prove useful for students and scholars working in such areas as social history, the history of agriculture, nutrition studies, the evolution of the food industry, and the history of color printing, of advertising, and of food marketing.

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