[Soapine, French Laundry Soap & Welcome Soap] Set of 30 Advertising Trade Cards

Providence, Rhode Island: Kendall Manufacturing Co. / Curtis Davis & Co, 1880. Very Good. Ca 1880. A collection of 30 trade cards featuring 17 different designs by Charlotte Perkins Gillman, who developed them as a young student along with her cousin Robert Brown. These trade are author's first published work, though she dismissed them in her autobiography as merely "an amusing source of income." Chromolithographed cards roughly measuring 2" x 4.5", with designs printed on rectos and many printed on versos with advertisements for Kendall Manufacturing's Soapine and French Laundry Soap, four cards advertise Curtis Davis & Co.'s Welcome Soap; ten versos are blank. The utopian feminist best-known for her semi-autobiographical short-story "The Yellow Wallpaper" written after a bout of severe postpartum psychosis.