Who drew these gnomes?
Help us solve a mystery from our archives
Buried treasure… lies in the voluminous Hammacher Schlemmer archive at Duke University. Our researcher recently opened a slim folder to discover four original ink drawings of our trademark gnomes. Yellowed with age and showing pre-production corrections in a couple of spots, they’re the first original artifact of our demihuman mascots that we’ve yet found. Even more exciting, we haven’t seen them in any of the catalogs or ads that we’ve digitized thus far.
They’re excellent examples of commercial illustration, rich with detail, redolent with charm. The gnomes tidy up, have tea, and cook a game bird over a campfire. Their little dog accompanies them all the way, sniffing curiously at the bird, barking at the vacuum cleaner.
There’s no other documentation with the folder. It’s listed in the archive guide as “’Gnomes’ art, 1920s”. That seems about right. They’re in a similar style to the gnomes in our 1923 catalogue, for example. More we cannot say, including the thing we’d like to know the most: who is the artist?
First, we don’t think these are by the same artist as the 1923 examples we just mentioned (whose name we also don’t know). This artist renders ears very consistently across all these drawings, and they’re different from any of the published 1923 drawings. His noses are snubbier, his hands more detailed. The little dog is furrier and all white - the 1923 dogs have shorter hair and a spot or two.
It wouldn’t be a total shock if they were by the same artist, but most likely it was different artists working to the same style guide. But wait: these original drawings do offer one tantalizing clue not present on the others: a signature!
Even that has its own mystery: monogram conventions would usually indicate the initials were DSA, but we don’t really know; the A could be in any position. Whatever the case, that clue hasn’t borne fruit yet. I’ve combed reference guides to American artist signatures, pored over newspaper articles mentioning advertising agencies in New York in the 1920s, and paged through magazines of the time looking for that signature, or other illustration that bears this artist’s stamp. I haven’t found as much as one promising lead.
Retail history often hits such dead ends. Ephemera like this had so much presence in people’s daily lives, but was rarely considered worth documenting or preserving. But I’m betting that an illustrator of this quality left a mark somewhere (no pun intended).
So I’m turning to you, Gnomenclature readers, to help solve this hundred-year-old mystery. Anyone out there recognize your Grandpa Don’s signature? Anyone deeply knowledgeable about commercial artists working in New York in the early-mid 20th century? Anyone sitting on a cache of Hammacher Schlemmer accounts-payable invoices from the Calvin Coolidge administration? Comment below or email me. Let’s solve the Riddle of the Gnomes!
And if you like Gnomenclature, you should know about Shoddy Goods, Jason’s other newsletter. It tells similar stories about consumer culture and history, but drawn from the rest of the world outside Hammacher Schlemmer. It’s about as fun as your Inbox can get.