Ernst Freihoff may not be a familiar name to many, but to many girls who grew up in or spent time in Germany in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, his company’s Glanzbilder was an essential part of childhood. What are Glanzbilder? You may know them as Scrapbilder, Poesiebilder, Albumbilder, Rosenbilder, or even Oblaten. These colorful sets of pictures were printed on a 23 cm by 16.5 cm sheet, with little tabs between the images. What kind of pictures? Hearts, flowers, trees, Christmas Motifs, toys, and the most adorable animals. These pictures could be separated and traded or pasted into Poesie albums along with a poem.
My cousin helped me start my collection many years ago. We would ride our bicycles to the local stationery store and spend ages debating which ones we had to have. After buying them, we would carefully split some of the sheets in half to “double” the number of image types in our collection. I still have an envelope full of them here at home, many still in the original cellophane. Looking through them always makes me smile.
But what started the Glanzbilder mania? How did people get caught up in collecting and trading these colorful pictures? Believe it or not, the story starts with Beef Extract…
Invention of Glanzbilder
In 1837, when Godefroy Engelmann patented his “litho-color press or color lithography imitating painting,” a color printing technique called a Chromolithograph, he was convinced his works would replace paintings. They didn’t. (Well, not really, unless you consider the 1972 Pink Floyd concert poster you had hanging in your dorm room to be fine art.) What DID happen is that more and more companies used Chromolithography, and over time, printing and paper became cheaper and cheaper. Suddenly, even people of average means could afford to have colorful pictures hanging on their walls (like your Pink Floyd poster).
Note—German playwright Alois Senefelder patented the lithographic printing process in 1799 because he needed a cheap way to reproduce his plays. He stopped at black-and-white. Engelmann took the idea and added 20 colors.
The first Glanzbilder were produced a few years later by the fine art printer Hagelberg, Berlin. That same year, 1860, he also created a portrait of Lincoln that you can find today in the Library of Congress collection. German bakeries set those early pictures on cakes and Lebkuchen as decoration. But because they were so pretty, people usually saved the pictures to use again.
” Liebig Extract” and the Collecting Craze!
My mom tells me stories about collectible pictures that came in certain products, like margarine, that kids went crazy for. Putting collectible pictures in products began in 1875, when a marketing genius came up with the idea of including a numbered picture with every jar of Liebig Extract (beef bullion). Suddenly, everyone HAD to have the whole set! Other companies learned fast, and by 1890, the collecting mania was a thing. Printers produced special books to collect and mount these advertising images.
Then, the collections began to blur. As the mania for collecting images grew, people got more creative with HOW they kept them. Collectors pasted the most beautiful pictures into journals or family albums as decoration. These memory albums or scrapbooks were used to preserve memories (which explains why the English name for Glanzbilder is “Scrap pictures”). Visitors might sign someone’s book and glue a Glanzbild next to the signature. (Remember, this was before everyone had a camera on their phone! Memories were preserved differently.)
While the advertising images remained collectible, the Glanzbilder, pictures that exist just because they are pretty, gained importance.
Poesiealbum von Hedwig, 1901, Kurrentschrift, nördl. Niedersachsen
What are Glanzbilder?
Don’t confuse Glanzbilder with stickers! Glanzbilder aren’t backed with an adhesive. Instead, a set of images, all related by theme, is printed on 24.5 cm by 13.5 cm (sheet size A57) glossy paper. The paper is then embossed, giving the images a dimensional feel.Then the white space between the images is mostly cut away, leaving tabs to hold the images together. The “fancy” ones go back through a glitter process (these are everyone’s favorite… think about how your kids got excited about shiny Pokemon cards). The cutting (actually punching) and glitter are still done by hand.
Stationery stores sold the Albumbilder by the sheet, and people lined up to find the newest and prettiest ones. Common images were flowers or animals, but holiday images, especially Christmas pictures, are very popular.
What do people DO with the pictures?
Many Glanzbilder were collected because, well, they are pretty pictures. Most commonly, the images were glued into Albums, like Poesie Albums, along with a poem or saying. What is a Poesie Album? Think of them as autograph books. You let a friend inscribe with a lovely poem or phrase, something to remember them by forever. Poesie Albums were all the rage. Again, this was before Facebook and before people had yearbooks to sign at the end of the school year.
This picture was sent to me by April, who inherited it from her parents. The picture, which measures 13″ x 17″ was created by gluing several images together to make one “portrait”.
Creative people took things even further. Christmas Glanzbilder glued to a bit of stiffer cardboard made beautiful Christmas Tree Ornaments, or could be used to decorate a Christmas Card or letter. Decoupaging (gluing pictures onto a box and then covering them with clear lacquer) jewelry or keepsake boxes was a great way to “pretty up” a plain box. You will still see people using them on Easter Eggs! And Mothers used them to decorate Schultüten for their children. If something could be decorated, a Glanzbild might just find its way onto it. Think of it as clip art in the days before computers.
Hannes Grobe, CC BY-SA 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5>, via Wikimedia Commons
Of course, Glanzbilder were traded on the school playground, sort of like Baseball Cards. People specialized in flowers or animals, wanting full sets of special images.
Keeping the Glanzbilder Tradition Alive
Although the peak of Glanzbilder trading happened between 1880 and 1910, in 1948, Ernst Freihoff founded the Ernst Freihoff Papierwarenvertriebsgesellschaft mbH (say THAT three times fast!) in Coesfeld. Why? According to company legend, he started the printing company with only 15 Glanzbilder designs. After seeing an older woman get misty-eyed when she saw the Glanzbilder he had produced, he decided to devote his business to publishing Glanzbilder designs. Over time, the company grew to produce more than 260 designs!
Today, Ernst Freihoff’s children still run the company in Coesfeld. They are the last of the German Glanzbilder producers still standing, and they focus on the “nostalgia” side of Glanzbilder. Company employees travel to Flea Markets, secondhand stores, and Ephemera Sales every year, searching for undiscovered Glanzbilder sheets to reproduce. Today, the company produces 400 different designs! And they still do print runs the old-fashioned way, with the 24-color printers their father used. Punching out the spaces and glitter is done by hand.
Most Glanzbilder are bought around Christmastime for decoration. They also find their way into scrapbooks, enhancing family photo albums. Thanks to the current trend of decorative journaling (it’s huge with my youngest and her friends), a whole new generation is buying Glanzbilder.
Did You Collect Glanzbilder? Do you still have them?
Some call them Kitsch, nostalgic old pictures of a time gone by. But for the many of us who still have a stack of Glanzbilder tucked away in a drawer, they are as important as a baseball card collection or stubs of concert tickets. They represent a time when we wrote poems in albums for our friends and included our favorite Glanzbild as a memory keeper. A remembrance of a simpler time, but printed in 24 colors and dusted with glitter!
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EAS 3006 Vintage Die Cut Scrap Paper Glanzbilder Children Flowers Dogs Full Double Sheet 4 Altered Art Scrapbooking CollectingPigs Chimney Sweeps Horseshoes Clover Happy New Year Glanzbilder SCRAP RELIEFS (1 sheet) #7326 – Embossed Die Cuts – Made in GermanyPaper Die Cut Scraps Assorted Baby Animals MLP Out Of Print #EFrom Germany 16 Vintage Victorian L&B Circa 1882-1920 Die Cut Paper Scraps Forest Animals #E
glanzbilder Bloemen NEW old stock!.
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Christmas Glanzbilder
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Hello
It was so lovely to find and read this article about Glanzbilder, although I never knew them by that name. I called them Oblaten. I grew up in England but had a German mum, and most summers of my childhood were spent in Germany. This was in the 60’s-70’s. I think I was also introduced to Oblaten through a cousin. I loved them and collected them in a book for years, and I still have some. A lot of your picture on your site were very familiar. It was lovely to see them again! (: Because I grew up in England I had no friends to share this with. It was something I did very much alone. Thank you for your article, it was so nice to read about the history and get a context, and to know I wasn’t the only child in the world collecting these little pictures!
My cousin called them Oblaten too. And like you, my friends (in the US) didn’t know them either. Maybe that’s why I still have them? There was no one to give them too or trade with
Thanks for posting this article about the history of Glanzbilder. I was introduced to them when I was 10 years old, in Turkey via a friend who was born in Germany and spent 2 years in our town. She had given me lots of them as a gift. After she went back, she also sent me numerous letters with Glanzbilders and after nearly 30 years later I found very nice, new glossy Glanzbilder sheets (same series that I remember from childhood) in a scrapbook store in the Netherlands. I was happy and misty eyed like the old lady in your story! 😛
What a wonderful story! Thank you for sharing.