We’re sticking with #TradeCardTuesday this week, thanks to Van Stan’s Stratena, a rubber cement compound formulated by Frederick Van Stan in England. Van Stan sold the manufacturing, marketing, and trademark rights to Van Stan’s Stratena Company Cement to Philadelphia’s John A. Keenan on July 1, 1876.
The warning against purchasing fraudulent bottles of the cement at the top of this ca. 1900 trade card may be in reference to a court dispute with Frederick Van Stan’s son, Victor. After arriving in Philadelphia in 1889, the younger Van Stan worked for Keenan for a time before quitting to begin manufacturing and marketing his own line of ‘Van Stan’s Improved Cement’ in nearly identical packaging and bottles.
Keenan’s first attempts to prosecute Victor Van Stan failed. After a number of appeals, however, the case reached the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 1904, who sided with Keenan, despite declaring that while Keenan “as in most cases where a [person] undertakes to act as his own counselor and attorney” had done a lousy job of defending his case and, in presenting a “paper-book of nearly 200 pages” had “to use the most expressive word, made a ‘mess’ of” presenting his arguments.
This trade card is from the Hagley Library’s Fingerman ephemera collection (Accession 2009.213). To view more material from this collection online, visit its page in our Digital Archive by clicking here.
