Donohoue and Henneberry Advertising Cover

No matter what type of ephemera someone is collecting it. An area that I do not know much about is advertising covers. As you probably do know, my interest is in books and related items. So it is no wonder that there is a crossover between my interests and envelopes, err, I mean advertising covers. Since I thought from time to time I would show an interesting advertising cover, I figured that I should know something about them.
There is a nice site which reviews the terminology :
http://alphabetilately.com/A.html Hopefully I will not mess up too badly in describing these items.

Shown here is a great cover from Donohue and Henneberry. Based on the site noted above I think it is a "topical advertising cover". Its building is shown in addition a mention of its "Red Line Series" was made. This series is the only printing done by the company in the 1880's. The Red Line Series remained popular into the 1890's. The Red Line Series however was not a series of reading books. It was rather a series of school registers, report cards, diplomas, receipt books and the like. In fact the Donohue and Henneberry 1889 catalogue lists four pages of this kind of "red line" item for sale.

Early on this company was a bookbinder only. From 1871-1878 they were Donohue, Wilson and Henneberry and as a bookbinder was succeeded by Donohue and Henneberry. The publisher came to be in 1890 as Donohue, Henneberry and Company. In 1900 they were succeeded by Donohue Brothers as Michael A. Donohue went in one direction and William F. Henneberry went in another becoming Henneberry Company. In 1901 Donohue Brothers became M.A. Donohue. Throughout the 1800's they were located at the Dearborn address in Chicago.

In addition to publishing and binding books, they manufactured office supplies-pads of paper, pencils, crayons, clips, etc.

19th Century Dust jackets-Donohue Henneberry

Most all juvenile books in the late 19th century either came in boxes or had dust jackets. The all too frequent bookseller ads which state: dust jacket-none as issued are generally nonsense.

What most of the jackets have in common is that they are relatively colorless having black writing/pictures which match the underlying cover on brown jacket paper.

Here is a very nice dust jacket that does not follow that rule. This book which was published in 1891 by Donohue, Henneberry and Company of Chicago has a dust jacket in color. As can be seen, it does match cover but has red and black coloring. The 1891 date is on the title page.




This book is #2 in the two volume All Aboard Series written by Edward Rand. This series was published by 8 different publishers between 1881 and the early part of the 20th century. Edward Rand was the author at least 10 series.

This series will be discussed in a future blog entry