In 2011, the State Library purchased a rare early 20th-century example of Australian advertising ephemera produced for the well-known, but now defunct, Sydney retailer Grace Bros.

Grace’s ABC For All Of Us appears, at first glance, to be a charming alphabet picture book for children, containing 26 quirky rhyming couplets paired with gorgeous Edwardian-style colour illustrations. Closer examination reveals a strange contradiction between the ‘look-and-feel’ of the ABC booklet and its thinly-veiled advertising content. With its subject matter and explicit advertorial messages clearly targeted to the adult reader, there was probably little of actual interest to a child this small promotional pamphlet. It was cryptic puzzle waiting to be cracked. An opportunity presented itself when University of Sydney MA student Natalia Bragaru selected Grace’s ABC as the subject of her research project for Dr Anita Callaway’s postgraduate seminar course ‘Backstage at the Mitchell Library’.

Devising and conducting her investigation using the print and digital resources of the State Library, Natalia swiftly placed the booklet in the context of its production. Trawling the Trove digitised newspaper archive, she located advertisements for a Christmas letter-writing competition conducted by Grace Bros in December 1904.

First established in 1885, Grace Bros had benefited enormously from the influx of customers carried along George Street by trams travelling westward to the suburbs after 1882. By July 1904, the retailers had opened their self-proclaimed ‘Model Store’: a brand new, four-storey, ‘state of the art’ premises on the corner of George and Bay Streets at Broadway.

To capitalise on the Christmas shopping season, Grace Bros devised a ‘Letter to Santa’ competition. Their carefully planned marketing strategy was designed to encourage children and their parents to visit the new department store. Readers were reminded that Santa Claus was ‘staying at the Model Store this year’, and that the letter box was located in the toy department. Santa also promised to send each child ‘one of my A.B.C. Books ... the funniest books you ever saw’, offering two silver watches as prizes for the best boy and girl letter writers.

Further inspection of the ABC booklet’s pages confirms its seasonality and date: Santa is depicted on Grace Bros’ roof on the letter ‘X’ page, while the graphic and verse at the letter ‘J’ carry an explicit reference to the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05). Closer to Christmas Eve, more messages ‘To the Little Ones’ reported that thousands of letters had been received, and the ABC books were nearly all gone. By January, 5,760 letters had been submitted. The boy winner was decided (Horace Leslie Stock, of Eulah Creek near Narrabri), but the girl winner had been too close to judge, so the five young lady finalists would need to be interviewed by Santa, to determine who would receive the watch.

Another intriguing aspect of Natalia’s research project required her to attempt to verify the vendor’s suggested attribution of Grace’s ABC as the work of celebrated illustrator and artist, Norman Lindsay. Through careful comparisons of graphic details from Grace’s ABC with original Lindsay illustrations, varying editions of his publications and contributions to the Bulletin newspaper, Natalia was able to make a strong case to support this attribution.