Printing Stone Used in Stone Lithography for Two Detroit Companies: Banner Brand Cigars and Williams Brothers Co. Cet article n’est pas disponible.Printing Stone Used in Stone Lithography for Two Detroit Companies: Banner Brand Cigars and Williams Brothers Co

A relic of stone lithography that was used to print labels. One side of the stone shows the sprawling plant of a food processing company known especially for their pickles back when Detroit was known more for its pickles than automobiles, then, a nascent industry with start-ups scattered around the country. The other side shows five images Banner Cigars would have used in packaging its cigars. Stone lithography was favored by cigar companies because they were conducive to more brilliant color than other printing techniques, and cigar companies competed, in their very crowded field, on the beauty of their boxes or packaging. But of course, the appeal of color lithography spoke to other industries for whom labels were a significant element of their packaging. N.d., circa 1910. The stone measures 15 by 12.5 cm and is 6 cm thick. It weighs about 7 lbs. Because of the heaviness of stones, both sides would be used, as the case here. One side has a single larger oblong oval image of the Williams Brothers plant; the other side, an oval cameo portrait of Banner's founder, the image derived from a photo, three Banner bands (used to wrap around the fresh cigars), and a fifth vignette of a Banner emblem. The images are negatives, meaning that words are spelled in reverse, right to left, the letters, mirror images. The stone has some scratches on the smooth surfaces used for printing, and one shallow canal (our descriptive word choice, not a term-of-art) of roughness. The imperfections of the stone are all par for the course type of things and so not important condition issues, we believe.…