The 3½-inch-wide Gimbel Brothers receipt was tucked away inside an old edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
If I'm interpreting the receipt correctly, it's from January 10, 1925. A sale amount of $2.25 in 1925 would translate to about $29.15 today, according to The Inflation Calculator.
The advertising text, which spans the front and back of the receipt, states:
GIMBELS
the price you pay — that is the first
joy; the satisfaction you get — that is
the lasting advantage.
Gimbels pre-eminent leadership in
fashions has come through years of
international organization and close
application."
Gimbels was around from 1887 to 1987 before being liquidated.1 It was headquartered in New York City and once had the biggest chain of department stores in the United States. But perhaps its greatest legacy came in Philadelphia (where this receipt is from). It was in the City of Brotherly Love that Gimbels launched the first department-store parade. The first Gimbels Thanksgiving Day Parade was held in Philadelphia in 1920. It now known by the godawful name of 6abc Dunkin' Donuts Thanksgiving Day Parade.2
NOTE 1: Joan and I had a great time browsing at the oft-mentioned antique store in York New Salem earlier today. She picked up some tiny bottles for her burgeoning collection. And I came out with another wonderful haul of ephemera. I figure this box, by itself, should be good for two or three months worth of blog posts.
NOTE 2: If you're scoring at home, these were the most-popular posts on Papergreat during the past seven days:
1. Papergreat's star-studded 200th post (plus some chickens)
2. Saturday's postcard: New Jersey trolley line in 1907
3. You never know what you'll find in the "FREE" boxes
4. 1950 ticket stub for Colts-Steelers preseason NFL game
5. Reader comments: Stamp collecting, mysteries solved & Whirley mugs
6. Back-to-school week kicks off with vintage bulletin boards
7. Standard Farmer's Almanac 1905 excerpts, Part 1
8. 1897 Riverside book of works by Poe, complete with footnotes
9. Saturday's postcards: Two neat vintage scenes from Norway
10. The 29th anniversary of the first episode of St. Elsewhere
Also, here are some internet search phrases that have led people to Papergreat recently:
- bell howard projector
- dondi the elephant
- funny mayonnaise pics
- gravity railroad reading pa
- klein candy bar
- advertisements august 1963
- aßmannshausen
- bushkill falls
- inherent vice script3
- masc zywokostowa
- amalfi coast vintage postcard
- flying saucers
So there you have it.
Footnotes
1. Gimbels was mentioned in passing in this September 2012 post: Neat stuff from an 1880 volume of Edgar Allan Poe's works.
2. Other godawful names the parade has had since Gimbels left the picture include: 6abc IKEA Thanksgiving Day Parade, 6abc Boscov's Thanksgiving Day Parade, Channel 6 Mellon PSFS Thanksgiving Day Parade, and Channel 6 MasterCard Thanksgiving Day Parade.
3. I don't have it.
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