Corresponding to form: early business stationery

By the seventeenth century, the capitalisation of the world’s trade was already conducted on a large scale and its hub was moving from Amsterdam to London. This increasing prosperity was reinforced and facilitated by a fast-growing printing trade. 

The restrictive printing acts had not been effective for some years and in 1695 the Licensing Act of 1662 expired with the result that by the end of the century printing presses were established in most provincial towns. Paper was still an expensive commodity and so printing was an expensive service and stationery, for example, remained a distinguished, luxury item. Nevertheless, the artisans, traders, service providers, and shopkeepers, through the strength and high standing of their guilds, became the most influential group in every community. Their use of print in establishing and maintaining this influence is the subject of this article. 

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Until the 1760s, the predominant way for any business to signify and promote its presence was a hanging signboard. Wide-spread illiteracy ensured that businesses were careful to retain the image or symbol of their shop on their sign even if it no longer bore any relevance to the goods or service for currently on offer. Symbols were often ambiguous at best and generally passed down from father to son, or even from previous businesses which had used the same premises(1). With no reason to ever renew a sign, it is easy to imagine how they might fall into a dangerous state of repair. In 1762, perhaps as a consequence of accidents, hanging signboards were quite suddenly banned by law, and, henceforth, owners were told to fix them flush against the wall of the premises. This severely limited the signboard’s effectiveness, particularly in the narrow streets prevalent at that time. 

It might be purely coincidental, but it was at this time that there was a significant growth in the use of print by businesses as a promotional item. Initially, this took the form of a trade card, which, sensibly enough, usually had reproduced upon it the same design as that painted on the sign now fixed against the wall outside. Trade cards were not, by any means, a new phenomenon; Sir Ambrose Heal mentions one of about 1620,(2) but it was in the latter part of the eighteenth century that there was a sudden growth in their popularity. It is not always easy to assign accurate dates to trade cards because, although they might carry clues to their period, the same engraved image or name might linger for many years. The name of a business does not, necessarily change on the death of the proprietor, nor a Sovereign’s head at the death of the reigning monarch. 

For the tradesman, the hanging signboard had been a status symbol above and beyond commercial profit, representing as it did the quality of the goods and services and the aspirations of the business. Not surprisingly, the tradecard, although (relatively) small in size, had great care bestowed upon its design and production. Even the humblest of tradesmen required an impressive tradecard. It must be remembered that most trades relied almost exclusively on custom from the ‘upper-classes’, these being the only people with money available to spend on the services provided by others. The tone and design of these cards reflect the deference shown to the social standing of the customer; ‘At the service of Royalty, the Nobility and Gentry’. Such a description might be fitting, it was certainly intended to flatter a potential customer. 

The size and choice of paper for the business card we are familiar with today were not adopted until the Victorian era, although there are several examples from as early as 1780. Looking at the trade cards of two hundred years ago we would more likely describe them as sheets of paper, usually white, although, occasionally, on a tinted stock. Sizes varied but were commonly portrait and about 5 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches (140 x 89 mm). The size of these trade cards throws into doubt their exact purpose. At the time, these were variably called ‘shop- or trade bills’ or ‘message cards’. Although the trade card was a form of advertising, it was also frequently printed on a paper large enough to leave space for a bill to be handwritten below, and thus, became a billhead (what today we would call a letterhead) or invoice. It is not surprising that the billhead incorporated much of what was on the trade card plus an address (incorporating ‘at the sign of...’ until a system of house numbering was established in 1762). As well as the shop sign the billhead sometimes included a list of wares, etc on their letterhead. 

This was a significant change in business practice. Despite the existence of printing during the previous two centuries, all business correspondence/records had been conducted entirely by handwritten notes with little or no concern for self-aggrandisement. The popular letter-writing manuals of the time were not observed; tradesmen did not, apparently, bother with such convention. These early bills are rare because having been entered into a ledger, they were paid, and thrown away or ‘spiked’. However, with the loss of prominent signage (coupled with the proliferation of printing houses looking for commissions and driving prices down) businessmen began to realise for the first time that stationery was worth consideration. It was convenient and labour-saving to have printed headings, but once introduced the reaction of a customer impressed by a fine, engraved billhead quickly became an essential business aid. As stated earlier, London was a busy and thriving city – ‘a huge emporium’ in fact,(3) – and competition was already fierce. 

The design of the billhead tended to be symmetrical: the illustration would be to the left and the typeset or engraved wording symmetrically arranged to the right. The opening words would always be ‘Bought of’ or sometimes reduced to ‘Bot, Bt, or Bo of’. Less common is the expression ‘Debtor to’, which might, in turn, be reduced to ‘Dr to’. The use of swashes increased and became increasingly exuberant in style. As time went by, the engraved illustrations might include (as well as the original shop sign) classical figures and urns, ships, casks, bales or Chinamen (for tea importers). Views of business premises began to regularly appear, and engravers were encouraged to enhance the size of the building or even the number of chimney-stacks, to ensure the potential customer would be impressed. 

As the name suggests, one of the principal purposes of the billhead was to serve as an invoice for customers who had been allowed to buy on credit. The length of a billhead, therefore, depended upon the kind of trade: innkeepers and grocers might need more space in which to write long lists of minor items. In some cases, bills covered very long periods – even, occasionally, a year or more – and some shopkeepers are known to have lengthened the document considerably by sticking papers together to form a long, continuous strip (a curiously elaborate solution perhaps done because there was no common, secure way of fixing sheets of paper together). The longest such surviving billhead was issued by a butcher in 1880, covering eight months: it is 1.3 meters (over 51 inches) in length. 

As an economic measure, many traders used their engraved billhead plates for tradecards as well as for entries in the local trade directories. It was also common practice to use them – with the required image carefully hand-trimmed – as product labels. Typical of these were shoemakers, whose decorative insignia might appear on the billhead as a roundel or oval, and would appear again, cut out and pasted into the heel of a shoe. The concepts of corporate and product branding have their roots in this practice. 

The history of printing offers many instances in which characteristics resulting from the limitations of a common printing process are carried over into a new process, even when the new process does not share the same technical limitations. The power of the conventional, particularly in a craft such as printing, is remarkably strong and, in fact, not without value. Continuity of style provided printed matter with instant recognition of function. This has been one of the strongest and most enduring characteristics of printed stationery. 

One of these long-surviving conventions is the ‘engraved style’ – hand-engraved letters, sometimes complex and entwined, limited only by the imagination and skill of the engraver – which has been used on billheads and which has continued in infinite guises through to the twentieth century. Handwriting itself was experiencing something of a renaissance and it was copper-plate engraving that was used to ‘illustrate’ the numerous, sometimes magnificent, writing manuals of the period. There was also the influence of letterers of decorative, painted shop fascias and signboards. 

Printing from copper or steel plates was a slow business. Each dampened engraved card was placed between tissue paper and then stacked between glazing boards in a hydraulic press for twenty-four hours. This had the effect of flattening the raised, printed line that had been caused by the dampened paper being pushed under the pressure of the press into the engraved inked lines. The speed of production was about 500 a day (4). 

 By the middle of the nineteenth century, copper-engraving could no longer compete commercially with letterpress and lithographic printing. The lithographic craftsmen, drawing directly onto stone, were able to emulate the style of copper-engraved lettering and ornament and by 1820, specialists were emerging as lithographic writers in their own right. The Victorian conception of lettering was a very unconventional one, and letterforms were often elaborated or distorted for purely decorative purposes. Legibility, if considered at all, was usually of minor importance. The more exotic the better. The ornate, high Victorian style would develop in the early 1880s, into the sinuous letterforms of Art Nouveau. 

Letterpress printers were technically more restricted, but the typefounders quickly responded to commercial demands by issuing types accompanied by decorative border units enabling the printer to emulate the copper-engraved style. The technical ingenuity with which they disguised the fact that their types were, of course, manufactured in metal as separate units, was the result of competition with the sign-letterer, lithographic ‘writer’ and printer. As an alternative, Robert Thorne, of the Fann Street Typefoundry in London, produced his Fat Face in 1803, the first real letterpress display face. From then on, and for the remainder of a century, the jobbing letterpress printer could enjoy using a plethora of fabulous display founts from Thorne, Thorowgood, Figgins and others. 

The interdependence of engraving and letterpress printing is often revealed in tradecards and billheads. Both engravers (and, later, lithographic writers) and letterpress printers can be regularly seen to emulate the appearance of the other. Letterpress billheads began with simple arrangements, often asymmetrical, of roman and italic types, and might incorporate engraved woodblocks (printed in relief) for illustrated material. Alternatively, it is common to find engraved letters attempting (sometimes crudely) to imitate letterpress types. 

The advent of lithography as a commercial printing method made the production of billheads cheaper and quicker. Lithography allowed the image from a copperplate engraving to be transferred to stone, singly or in multiples, with greatly increased productivity. Billheads printed by this method bear all the ‘copperplate’ characteristics of flourish and curlicue, but, of course, lithography lacks the tension of the cut line, the intensity of the ink ‘pulled’ out of the engraved plate and the subtle, tactile quality of a paper that has been dampened and printed under pressure. 

From about 1820, tradesmen began to realise that they needed all-purpose stationery, which could function as a letter as well as for advice notes, invoices and statements. Before this, business letters had been written on plain paper or on billheads as described earlier. It was inevitable that the billhead would, eventually, shed its famous opening words, ‘bought of’ and emerge as a letterhead in its own right. The development was gradual however. Whilst the invoice (or bill) was a vital document of recorded business, the business letter was a comparative rarity before the Industrial Revolution. It was only in the mid-nineteenth century, with the advent of the postal reforms, the extension of literacy, and, later, the invention of the typewriter, that the concept of business correspondence began to flourish, and it was not until the final decades of the century that the letterhead – as we would recognise it today (eventually, complete with a telephone number) became commonplace.