Late 1996

Creative business cards find home in Erdenheim

By Rosland Briggs, Inquirer Staff Writer

-- You walk through the glass and wooden doors, and the sight hits you: four glass shelves filled with an array of business cards.

But they aren’t the typical 31/2-by-2-iflch cards with name, rank and phone number.

There’s a neon-green alien printed on a plastic card that feels like the top of a mousepad. There’s one card that looks like a check — and was designed to be ripped from a miniature checkbook. There’s a folded one for a writer that reveals a tiny

A typewriter bears the message in this business card.

typewriter when opened; the paper inside the machine slowly churns out the question “Am I the type writer you’re looking for?”

It’s the Business Card Museum in the lobby of the Three Marketeers, a promotional products company in Erdenheim, Montgomery County. The museum’s founder, Ken Erdman, is the company’s chairman. About 50,000 of the 300,000 cards in the collection are on display in the 11-by-12-foot space. They came from 120 -countries, he said.

“People not expecting to see it tend to stand there and ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh,’ “ Erdman said. “There are cards in every possible material, in every shape, color and size imaginable.”

The museum opened in March 1995 as a display area for Erdman’s hobby, which he started about 20 years ago. But until last May, when it opened to the public, only visitors to the office saw the eclectic mix of business promotions.

“I started it to preserve the business card as an art form and advertising media,” Erdman said. “It was also a little bit of nobody’s done it, so it’s a void to fill.”

Most museum visitors are students, graphic designers, artists, printers and others looking for logo designs, he said. Because the museum has not done a lot of promotion, the crowds have been light.

Tom Leggett, a marketing instructor at Drexel University, said business cards are essential as “leave-behinds,” but often, when a client is interested, “a card is a card.”

“It doesn’t make that much of a difference in the business world, but something unique doesn’t hurt,” Leggett said. “I might look at it, and say: ‘Oh, that’s nice.’”

But Erdman wants people to say that about all the cards in the Business Card Museum, which gets its cards from other collectors and people who’ve cleaned their desks. His card — a light-gray card imprinted with a hand extending a business card from a two-columned building — solicits even more cards with an invitation on the back to “contribute unusual, creative, famous persons, humorous or antique cards.”

The cards are sorted and arranged by Jennifer McNulty, a former intern at the company who is now a full-time staffer and tour guide. (Erdman’s looking for volunteers to assist her.)

When McNulty began working at the company, Erdman had a drawer full of interesting cards he’d collected. He also had boxes of cards from people who’d seen a 1989 article he wrote in Rotarian magazine, “How to Build Your Business with Business Cards.”

He asked readers to send their cards. And they haven’t stopped.

It ranges from a person sending one card that’s ‘really neat’ to others shipping large boxes,” Erdman said. One donor sent 150,000 cards for a shipping bill of $90.

McNulty said that when she started, each card got about four seconds to make the cut.

“Now, I dump them on the floor, shuffle them around, and the ones that make it stand out immediately,” she said.

The lucky ones that have made it to the display shelf include:

• A wooden one shaped like a saw blade from a company called Redwood Ltd. in California.

• A porcelain one from Salem China Co. in San Francisco, with birds etched on the front and the sales manager’s name on the back.

• A metal one with lines of hundreds of tiny holes from Harrington & King Perforating Co. Inc. in Paramus, New Jersey.

McNulty’s favorite features the neon alien from a Canadian company that sells children’s clothing made of glow-in-the-dark material.

Those cards that don’t stand out immediately, but aren’t run-of-the mill either, go into file drawers labeled with 90 “Yellow Pages” categories. (The magnetic ones land on the mustardy door of an old Frigidaire that stands in the corner.)

Erdman and McNulty

“People are looking at cards to see if there is a way to present cards that illustrate their businesses,” Erdman said. “They’re going from plain type to more exotic cards.”

But not as exotic as the antique collection dating back to the 1800s, which is kept in binders on a separate shelf.

The H.J. Heinz Co. created a card shaped and textured like a pickle in the early 1900s. The back of the card lists the company’s products. “They were way ahead of their time with graphic arts,” Erdman said.

Others feature Asians, African Americans and Native Americans in stereotypical poses, such as Asians in kimonos for perfume companies.

There also are social calling cards in the binders, including a floral one someone received years ago from Ellen F. Mason.

“You used them to let people know you’d been there,” McNulty said. “It’s interesting to see the ornate and flowery cards were men’s cards trying to woo ladies.”

Some still have folded corners that served as messages. Depending on which end was folded, receivers of the cards knew not to bother returning the visit or that condolences had been offered, she said.

The antique cards don’t have to audition as much for spots in the museum. But there are tests for the other cards.

“When is a business card really a good card? When you give it to somebody and they say, ‘Oh, can I keep this?’” Erdman said. “It becomes a miniature sales piece.”