The following selection of “picture cards” represents the quotidian historical ephemera that is only rarely preserved. Ranging from pretty dress-up dolls, included at one time in packages of coffee, to advertising cards touting sarsaparilla and snake oil, the items’ innocent and charming aesthetics and promotion of what we now know to be useless “medicines” suggest a period naivete that modern viewers tend to assume they’ve outgrown.

However, aside from a general loss of the decorous beauty in advertising seen here, the longer you look at these artifacts, the more you wonder how much has really changed.

Today’s “Tidbits” presents a scrapbook-like selection of turn-of-the-century picture cards for readers’ consideration. All of the images are courtesy of the Ypsilanti City Archives. (Click on any image for a larger view).

Here is a roguish-looking Mr. Fox. Someone has dressed him in a buckskin jacket, green short pants, and an ostrich-plumed hat.

On back is the legend "McLaughlin XXXX Coffee," and instructions on how to bend the tail to make a stand.

Another McLaughlin's Coffee doll is a portrait of "Queen Isabella of Spain."

Someone has inverted what is meant to be a neck ruff and attached crown and perched the ruff, rather becomingly, on the Queen's head.

The back of the doll specifies, "One doll, consisting of doll, extra garment and piece of furniture in each package of McLaughlin's XXXX Coffee."

A card advertising Hood's Sarsaparilla displays the image of three puppies observing presumably their parent kill a rat. It is interesting to note the old-fashioned straw-filled doghouse in the background.

"Catarrh" is an old-fashioned medical term for what we would think of as a bad sinus cold. Many catarrh remedies contained cocaine in various amounts and the abuse of catarrh powders, which were snorted, was a recognized problem.

The curative power of sarsaparilla described here is due less to the plant extract's potency than to a copywriter's imagination.

The arresting image of a "smashed portrait" seems to suggest that Brown's Iron Bitters will free patients from a haze of sickness, represented by the grey glass, and reveal the pure health lurking underneath.

Marketed here as a cure for malaria, Brown's Iron Bitters was a useless "medicine" and a dangerous one if the user forwent better treatments in order to ingest the bitters.

It is interesting to note that the description of malaria reveals that people did not yet understand it as a mosquito-borne pathogen.

Word association time! Quick: charming kitty along with a cigar set backwards on an ashtray that is drawn oddly: your first reaction?

Why, yeast of course. "The best Yeast I ever used."

A different coffee company's picture card offers a father's mossy old joke about his daughter's intended.

Lengthy testimonials as to the quality of the coffee and its "glazing" (roasting?) cover the back.

Today's last card, here shown triple actual size, is only about as big as a large postage stamp, and doesn't appear to be a picture card or trading card. Perhaps it was distributed in a church on a religious holiday. Its charm and grace offers a fitting ending note to today's Tidbits.

"Tidbits" is published every Friday on AnnArbor.com.