Sockl and Nathan

A “Sockl & Nathan” Christmas card from 1895

Sockl and Nathan was a British greeting card company and publishing company in the 19th century , with headquarters in London . It was founded and administered by Victor Sockl and Saul Nathan.

history

The company was a partnership between Saul Nathan and Victor Franz Theodor Sockl, a son of the painters Theodor Sockl and Clara Adelheid Sockl , née Soterius von Sachsenheim. Victor Sockl, his brother Carl Sockl and Carl's family emigrated from the Austrian Empire to Great Britain in the second half of the 19th century , most likely to avoid military service and to escape the unrest in Central Europe after the revolutions of 1848 . Carl Sockl was the company's accountant.

The company specialized in reprinting pictures. Your cards were hand- printed in Leipzig ; a manufacturing process that predated the mass production of greeting cards. The company, based at 4 Hamsell Street, City of London , was very successful for a while and among other things was a British purveyor to the court. The cards often did not have a company name, but were only labeled with the word “ Copyright ”, as there was fear of discrimination and business disadvantages due to the Jewish name “Nathan” (short for Nathanael ).

The company also operated as a publisher under the same name. She published illustrated books with children's poems.

After a fire in an adjacent building caused extensive damage to its inventory, the company fought to survive. Eventually things continued to decline, largely due to competition from the burgeoning greeting card industry, which was now mass-producing. The partners dissolved the company in February 1897.

A collection of around 200 cards remained in the private possession of the Sockl family. In the late 1980s, seven cards were reprinted by the Medici Society for several years. Approximately 100 cards were sold to an art dealer in the 1990s and displayed in his gallery in Wimbledon , London. The remaining 100 were donated to the Ephemera Society . An estimated 53 cards are in the extensive Laura Seddon Greeting Card Collection and are cataloged in her book A Gallery Of Greetings (1992). The collection is now on display at Manchester Metropolitan University as part of their collection of Victorian Occasional Prints, housed in the Sir Kenneth Green Library on the All Saints Campus.

Recording in public

Sockl and Nathan greeting cards were featured in magazines and journals of the time, especially in the 1880s. The new card concepts introduced by this company also included cards designed as autograph cards.