Selections from Archival and Special Collections:
An Album of Wine Labels
by Melissa McAfee | Special Collections Librarian
THIS ENCHANTING ALBUM was recently acquired for our culinary ephemera collection, which is comprised of advertising pamphlets, beer labels, menus, calendars, broadsides, and posters. The album contains 211 predominately German wine labels, collected by Lizzie Randell of Shropshire, England, dating from circa 1834–1862.
Lizzie was admired for her beauty and her excellence in Greek. In meeting with her many suitors, she requested that they dispense with the formalities of courtship and instead bring her a good bottle of wine. This album is a record of sorts of her encounters with these potential beaus. At the end of these dates, she skillfully removed the labels from all but three of the wine bottles using a mixture of bergamot and yellow soap. The missing labels were on bottles that she cracked over the heads of suitors who became too drunk or rowdy.
In addition to the fascinating story of Lizzie Randell, this book is interesting because of the techniques used to print the wine labels. Many of them are early examples of the use of chromolithography, a process of making multi-coloured prints, which relied on the use of several lithographic stones, one for each colour. Lithography was invented by the German actor and playwright, Alois Senefedler in 1798 to print music. This printing process employs flat surfaces and chemicals instead of carved or etched surfaces used in relief or intaglio printing. Chromolithography is an expensive and lengthy printing process. Senefelder, first described it in 1818 in his book, A Course on Lithography. The earliest examples of chromolithographs are from the 1830s to 1840s, few of which survive, making the chromolithographs in this album extraordinarily rare. Another printing process that can be seen in the album is the gold stamping on indigo-dyed paper, a process used on Japanese textiles in the 19th century.