Contemporary Collectibles by Linda Rosenkrantz

I see that the Campbell's Soup people have decided to change the design of their labels, pouring zillions of dollars into cutting-edge "neuromarketing" techniques — measuring prospective customers' eye movements and skin moisture levels — when confronted with a soup can. I don't know if they're actually changing the logo, but they have stated that it will be smaller.

For collectors, any change to that elegant old-fashioned signature script — made even more iconic since Andy Warhol's elevating it to fine art in the early 1960s — would be tantamount to sacrilege, as that white-on-red logo has been identified with Campbell's almost from the beginning.

That beginning was in 1869 in Camden, N.J., when a fruit merchant named Joseph Campbell and an icebox manufacturer named Abram Anderson formed a partnership to can vegetables, jelly, condiments and mincemeat. Their specialty was canned tomatoes, their first label showing a gigantic beefsteak tomato being pulled by two men. When Anderson opted out in 1876 (to start a competing venture), Campbell turned to the production of concentrated soups, using recipes developed by one of his young chemists, John T. Dorrance, based on research done in the kitchens of Paris. Dorrance invented a process of eliminating the water content of soup, enabling the company to retail Campbell's at less than a third of the price of the competition — the original price was 10 cents a can.

Though Joseph Campbell himself retired in 1894, the company continued to flourish under the stewardship of Dorrance and, by 1911, Campbell's was one of the first U.S. companies to market a branded food product nationally.

The company was always very savvy in terms of the potential of advertising; its first ads appeared on New York City trolley cars in 1899. The classic red-and-white label had been inspired by the colors of the Cornell College football team, and after 1900, when the company won the Gold Medallion for excellence at the Paris Exposition, a replica of the medal was added to the design.

Beginning in 1904, the company employed, with great success, the enduring corporate symbol of the two chubby, cherubic children known as the Campbell Kids. A Philadelphia illustrator named Grace Wiederseim Drayton was hired to create what would become an iconic symbol — a ladle-wielding boy and girl in apron and chef's toque with Buster Brown haircuts. Drayton admitted that she had modeled them on her own round face, chubby cheeks and turned-up nose, referring to them as Roly-Polys.

The characters quickly caught on, especially with children. Over a million postcards with their image were produced in 1910, and before long, children were collecting the Campbell Kids ads and all the premiums that were issued. A mountain of merchandise followed, from ashtrays to tie tacks, pennants to place mats, mirrors to mugs, to coloring and recipe books. Other items available to the collector include Homer Laughlin and Buffalo Pottery china, celluloid buttons, hot pad holders, wall thermometers, clocks banks, silver-plate spoons, salt and pepper shakers, lunch boxes and cookie jars.

With this range of Campbell's soup material, prices are, of course, all over the place, even taking the Andy Warhol artworks and prints out of the equation. One of the more unique was a c. 1900 lithographed, deeply embossed Campbell's soup tin, resembling a kind of innocent amalgam of the pop art work of Warhol and Jasper Johns, advertising "Campbell's Soup Six Plates for 10 Cents." It sold at a 1990 auction for $93,000.

Linda Rosenkrantz has edited Auction magazine and authored 18 books, most recently "Beyond Ava & Aidan: The Enlightened Guide to Naming your Baby" (St. Martin's Press). Visit her baby names website at http://nameberry.com. She cannot answer letters personally. To find out more about Linda Rosenkrantz and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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