Joel Jacobus is extremely knowledgable about Charles Addams merchandise and memorabilia. Today he inquires about an obscure subject that has been troubling him for years: "old enameled copper dishes bearing commissioned advertising art by New Yorker cartoonists. Where did these come from?"
Joel continues:
About fifteen years ago I saw an eBay listing for an old looking, small, enameled, copper dish with a Charles Addams drawing on it that might be advertising swimwear. Foolishly, I wasn’t very excited about it at the time and I didn’t win the bidding. As an obsessive Charles Addams collector who scans eBay every night, I gradually became aware of my huge mistake as fifteen years went by before another dish showed up. But when it did, the person had two Charles Addams dishes plus four other dishes that were obviously from the same advertising campaign with art by Syd Hoff and Sam Cobean. There was only one image by each artist so three of the dishes are duplicates. And most of them are in appalling condition. And I bought them all. But I was still no wiser about what they are.
Are these dishes, trays, ashtrays, coasters, or something else?
When were they made?
Why were they made?
Why are there so few of them in the marketplace?
Even with the dishes in my possession I only knew two things about them:
1. The advertising in all three of the images is for a swimsuit company called Cole.
2. Most (but not all) of the dishes have the name Bernäd (not Bernard) stamped on the back.
As companies, Cole and Bernäd are not very well documented. However, I’ve found this information:
In 1941 Fred Cole changed the name of “West Coast Knitting Mills” to “Cole of California” and focused on swimwear. In 1948 “Bernäd Creations Ltd” was incorporated on November 4th (but may have been manufacturing things before their incorporation date). In 1951 the cartoonist Sam Cobean died. Therefore it seems likely that the promotional Cole of California dishes, with commissioned artwork by Charles Addams, Sam Cobean, and Syd Hoff, made by Bernäd Ltd, were created between 1941 and 1951, and more likely between 1948 and 1951.
Then I acquired a Bernäd ad from 1948 for enameled copper “cartoon trays” with William Stieg images on them. So, apparently, they are “trays” rather than “dishes.” I assume they mean ashtrays. These are clearly the same enameled copper trays as the Cole images, but rather than being for a specific advertising campaign, the ones in the ad are just pre-existing licensed images for sale to the public.
Bernäd Creations Ltd was a company that licensed images and printed them on things. In addition to enameled copper trays, they also made: ceramic plates, cocktail napkins, cocktail glasses, mugs, ashtrays, greeting cards, posters, figurines, pinback buttons, matchbooks, and other ephemera. They were apparently very successful with their line of Steig (“People are no damn good”) and Herb Gardner (“Next week we’ve got to get organized”) images. Used Bernäd items with images by these two artists are still generally available on eBay. They also produced Sam Cobean and Peter Arno licensed trays but those are harder to find.
The three known Cole advertising images are:
Charles Addams—A predecessor of the Pugsley character saying to a Grandma Addams-like character who has an octopus stuck in the top of her swimsuit, “It wouldn’t [have] happened with a Cole, Gramma.”
Sam Cobean—A woman with a thought bubble showing her wearing a swimsuit and looking much thinner is thinking, “You mean a Cole could do this to me?”
Syd Hoff—A couple, in bathing suits, is on a beach. The wife is looking through a telescope at stars, the husband is looking at women wearing bathing suits. The caption reads, “Heavenly bodies!” The stars and planets across the top of the tray spell out Cole.
To add to the confusion, a Bernäd tray by Peter Arno also has a swimsuit motif and shows an elderly man staring at a young women in a bathing suit and saying, “By Jove I’d almost dip into capital for her!” But as the tray doesn’t mention Cole (and is a pre-existing New Yorker image that was licensed) it’s probably unrelated to the advertising campaign.
The Tee and Charles Addams Foundation has no record of Mr. Addams creating anything for a Cole of California advertising campaign.
So that leaves me with these questions: When did the Cole advertising trays come out? What were they for? Were they available for sale? Or were they promotional items that were sent to wholesalers or stores? Or were they only given to prized employees? Someone out there must know, and it would help me to sleep at night if they shared the knowledge.
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A cartoon by Peter Arno and a spot drawing by an unidentified artist
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February 3, 2024 Update: Much thanks to Marcus Gray, who has come up with a 1951 Los Angeles newspaper clipping with a column by Ezra Goodman. The writer, a Hollywood columnist and publicist, also collected ashtrays. The text in the lower half of the left-hand column dates the Syd Hoff "Heavenly Bodies!" ashtray to a Cole of California event held at the Griffith Observatory and the Cole estate. (I don't think Goodman knew Hoff's first name.) This information correlates well enough with Joel Jacobus's conjecture that these three Cole trays most likely date from 1948 to 1951.
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| Daily News, Los Angeles, September 19, 1951, p. 29 |
Note: My thanks to Joel Jacobus for the fifteen years of interrupted research that went into this post.
Help us learn more about these ashtrays. Help Joel to sleep at night. Please share whatever you know about Cole of California's advertising campaign using art by New Yorker artists.
Speaking for myself, I'm also curious about whoever may have created the obscure spot drawing from 1938. Anyone?
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