Date: 15 August -15 September 2025
Location: London, UK
When interior decoration professionalized in urban centers throughout the world in the nineteenth century, new businesses ranging in scale from family furniture firms in Damascus to department stores in Philadelphia began to market their products using trade catalogues. Business owners, artists, printers, distributors, advertisers, and writers worked together to produce this genre of print media in a variety of formats, from ephemeral pamphlets to published books with elaborate illustrations made using expensive new technologies like chromolithography and photography. All did more than advertise goods for sale. Centered on the modern interior, trade catalogues were as much sites of ideological and geopolitical contestation as they were commercial and pedagogical media.
We seek papers for a provisional panel at the Business History Conference 2026, entitled “Trade Catalogues as Joint Affairs in the Design Business (1850–1950),” that maps and investigates the social relations alternately embedded in the making of trade catalogues and produced by them. Contributing to recent scholarship that reexamines promotional literature within a web of financial, legal, aesthetic, and social relations, this panel considers trade catalogues to be active participants in the co-creation of the modern interior across time and space and inside and outside the brick-and-mortar business. We especially welcome papers with methodological and historiographic contributions that address how trade catalogues changed how people did business, and specifically the ways in which trade catalogues shaped the business of interior architecture and decorating and design.
To propose a paper, please submit a 300-word abstract and 1-page CV to Roxanne Goldberg (rgoldberg@ethz.ch) and Damla Göre (damlagore@gmail.com) by September 15.