Pea Journal — Rice & Co. 1885 Victorian Trade Card

In the 1880s, if you wanted to sell seeds to American home gardeners, you needed a salesman. Jerome B. Rice of Cambridge Valley, New York, found the perfect one: a pea couple dressed in Victorian formal attire, bearing the legend “Rice's Seeds — We Are American Wonders. We Are the Earliest and Best” — part of a celebrated plant people trade card series that turned chromolithographic whimsy into one of the most effective marketing strategies of the Gilded Age.

The front cover reproduces Rice's iconic 1885 trade card in full — an anthropomorphic pea couple in formal Victorian attire, the man in tailcoat and top hat, the woman in bonnet and full-skirted dress, both constructed from pea pods and pea plants, rendered in vivid chromolithography with the warmth and humour that made Rice's plant people series the most charming advertising of the era. The back cover presents a vintage-style botanical lithograph of the Grand American Pea (Pisum sativum L.) — cross-section of the pod, real-size seeds and seedlings, and a mature plant climbing a trellis — inspired by seed catalog illustrations originally copyrighted in 1883 by Clark & Richmond of Buffalo, N.Y.

Product Details

• Format: 5.75 × 8 in (14.6 × 20.3 cm)
• Pages: 150 lined pages (75 sheets)
• Perforated pages — tear out cleanly without damaging the binding
• Paper weight: 90 gsm, suitable for fountain pens and pencils
• Hardcover with matte finish, casewrap sewn binding
• Weight: 400 g (14.1 oz)

Perfect For

• Collectors of Americana, Victorian trade cards, and 19th-century advertising ephemera
• Gardeners and horticulturalists who love heirloom varieties and kitchen garden traditions
• Botanical illustrators and artists inspired by Victorian seed catalog lithography
• Food historians and culinary enthusiasts celebrating American seed heritage
• Fans of Victorian humour, anthropomorphic art, and Gilded Age popular culture
• Thoughtful gifts for home cooks, allotment gardeners, and whimsical stationery lovers

Read more: Jerome B. Rice & Co. and the Art of the Victorian Trade Card