Epices

A Trip through Spice Land

1920rif. 10932California: Smart & Final Company 1920. Pamphlet. Target Brand Spices. A Trip through Spice Land. Smart & Final Company: California ca.1914-20. 110x180mm brown stiff card wrappers stapled cream paper 24pp. 23 monochrome photogravure illustrations. Near Fine/- faint edgwear TARGET BRAND SPICES A Trip through Spice Land. California : Smart & Final Company undated circa 1914-1920.¹ 110x180mm printed brown stiff card wrappers stapled cream paper 24pp. Illustrated with twenty-three monochrome photographic plates. Wrapper edges very faintly worn. ¶ An uncommon American grocery-trade promotional booklet using a sequence of photographs to trace the cultivation harvesting and preparation of four staple spices: pepper cassia bark Dutch cinnamon mace and nutmeg. The journey proceeds through Tellicherry and Alleppey in India and Padang Harbour Sumatra then part of the Dutch East Indies presenting the landscapes plantations workers and laborious processing methods through which the spices reached the American market. The photographs are particularly interesting for the manner in which they construct an exotic geography of everyday consumption bringing distant producing regions and unfamiliar agricultural practices before the American grocery buyer and consumer. The booklet is remarkably restrained as advertising: there is little overt emphasis on brand price or exclusivity and the promotional message is conveyed instead through provenance visual documentation and an implicit assurance of authenticity. Smart & Final was established in San Francisco in 1914 through the consolidation of several local grocery businesses and subsequently became one of the principal wholesale grocers on the West Coast. The firm was an early adopter of the cash-and-carry model dispensing with the established practice of wholesale delivery and credit.¹ A Trip through Spice Land belongs to this formative period of the company's development and is an unusually tangible example of the educational and promotional literature employed by the American grocery trade. Rare. An attractive piece of commercial ephemera documenting both the early twentieth-century American grocery trade and contemporary efforts to acquaint consumers with the distant origins and production of familiar spices. § Unrecorded. See also OCLC accession #40884650 at Harvard for a similar item published by Nation-Wide Stores Division. ¹ Dated by visual reference to the car pictured at p.19 and the vessel pictured at p.24. Smart & Final Company unknown

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