[Trade Catalogue] 1899 Heywood Brothers and Wakefield Company Makers of "The Heywood" Children's Carriages, Sleeping Coaches and Go-Carts

Softbound. Card covers. Cloth spine. Good. Folio, 30 by 23 cm. 128, [2] pp. One unpaginated sheet in center. Virtually every page is illustrated, most with a large illustration of a wheeled carriage. A few pages near the end have multiple illustrations of parasols, which were attached to the carriages, and one page has two illustrations of runners, to be used in winter. There is a price list given at the front and on the final leaf. The carriages here used wicker for their cabs, which allowed for elaborate decorative work, and thus the carriages, regardless of their intended purpose, are uniformly pretty. They hark back to a bygone era of horse-drawn carriages, long gowns with intricate lace and flamboyant feather bedecked chapeaux, and decorous strolls through groomed grounds. Heywood Brothers traces its roots back to 1826, Wakefield Company, to 1855. The two rattan and wicker furniture companies merged in 1897, just two years before the issuance of this catalogue. The company subsequently got into other areas of furniture production. The company's primary manufacturing plant was closed in 1979 but some parts of the business survived, and the company sold rights to its wooden furniture designs in the 1990s. Condition: Cover with some chipping, creasing, soiling. Spine cloth peeling at ends. Edge staining to title leaf. Otherwise, clean, with a moderate amount of age toning.