A dozen small cards with painted Chinese business signs

NA. Fine. The signs and/or markings for Chinese businesses here are quite distinct from the signs represented in the 1931 classic color plate book, "The Shop Signs of Peking", suggesting, among other things, that the signs in that book might have somewhat less generic than one is first led to believe. Unlike that book, the illustrations on these cards are entirely painted, not merely hand-colored. We would assume that these were created for the tourist market, but given their diminutive size and ephemeral nature, combined with our never having seen such cards before, we have to believe they are quite scarce With the pictorial element on all the cards (truncated) entirely on the left side of the cards, the thought was surely that these would be used as place cards, a common appurtenance to the more formal dining of an earlier era. N.d., early 20th century probably. Short captions indicating the business whose signage is displayed are written in small block letters at the base of the flip side of each card. Businesses represented a fan shop, a Manchu hat button shop, a shoe maker, a hatter, a yellow wine business of some sort, a rug shop, a curio store (which shows other signifying objects presumably placed by an entrance in addition to a sign), a dealer in pearls, a second-hand clothing store, a pipe store (tobaccanist?), a restaurant, and a ginseng herb store. The cards are generally clean, with the most minor of occasional marks. (Inventory #: 007948)