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Hotel labels

Short history of my collection

My collection of old hotel labels, that was apllied to the baggages, is born from a youthful curiosity. Un fact they was born watching an old cardboard bag covered by coloured labels, printed with many colours and in different size. A bag initially used to keep alive my toys for many years, today full of world wide hotel labels.
My passion for this unusual kind of collection start with my first italian and foreign travels, visiting the owners of hotels and old printing houses, and with the trade with friend collectors and moreover with some personal ads in newspapers, yearbooks, magazines and in many web pages.

How they born

The hotel labels for bags is born in the late ‘800 and since the end of 1910 to the beginning of the 1950 had have a big splendour period. Printed in chromolithography in 12 or 13 colours, the bag label bring forward the information depliant and the advertising on the press and television. We can think that, sticking on the bags thiese labels, the hotelkeepers made a cheap advertising charged to the clients, that was a sort of “sandwich-men”; the client, with his baggage, showed their economic possibilities with conceit. The use of paper labels disappeared gradually around 1960. Only few hotels still use the self-adhesive labels.
We can distinguish three essential elements in the hotel label: the text, the ornament and the illustration that, being affected to the trend and historical period, specify their style.

Catalogation criteria

To know the value of a paper hotel label we must interpret by the graphic style the period as shown below:
1° period before 1800 and until 1910 - incunabola generally on paper, weight paper or bills.
2° period (1910/1929) - on the illustrated and coloured labels we can read often the name of the hotel owner, the city, the street with the street number.
3° period (1930/1960) - chromolithography (lithographic impression with different colours), lithography (reproduction of drawings with greasy inks on plate), clichè (matrix with reflected picture of the print engraved).

Where you can find them

In Italy you can find them in little markets or by second-hand dealers in some cities, or also trading them with collectors.
In foreign countries: in Portugal, Spain, France and United States they are in the little markets and antiquarian bookshops.

Filing

We can file them by continents, states, region, city, graphic style or theme. The themes are different: size, skyscrapers, hotle hall, porters and hotel boys, care places, mountain areas, sea areas, colonial hotel and Orient, inns, motels, airport hotels.

Preservation

It’s better to use a rings album with moving sheets, to move easy the labels.

Collaboration request:

If you have magazines, catalogues or news about the graphic plant Richter & C. in Napoli, company born 1842 and liquidated in 1948/1950, please write me.