Sale 2520 | Lot 364

(ACME QUALITY PAINT & VARNISH) An exceptional company album entitled A Visit to the Home of Acme Quality Paint and Varnish, including 58 narratively-sequenced photographs, each accompanied by a descriptive tour-like caption.
The album opens with a 7-point introduction on the nature and advantages of using paint. Following this, a brief history of the company, founded as Acme White Lead and Color Works in 1884 in a pre-boom downtown Detroit. The neatly-composed scenes show all manner of subsectors including the administration and research buildings, printing works, spraying booths, grinding mills, raw material warehouse, Kalsomine plant, paint works, dry color plant, varnish works, 75-foot watertower, and occupational scenes of the diverse workforce clad in paint-stained workwear, among much, much more. Also depicted are the company's "test fences" scattered throughout the plant. Silver prints, the images measuring 7½x9½ inches (19.1x24.1 cm.), linen backed, each with a letterpressed caption (for the facing photograph) on verso. Oblong 4to, black leatherette with a gilt-lettered title and company logo; twin-bolt binding. Circa 1924

[2,000/3,000]

Acme Quality Paint and Varnish Co. had vastly expanded by the time this album was compiled, some 40 years after its founding. At this point the plant comprised 55 separate buildings spread among the 13 acre plot, and over 700 people in the factory workforce alone (excluding executives and corporate employees).