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 Confectioners' Equipment Catalogs
These catalogs show the American candy industry in its infancy. As the candy trade industrialized, and the scale of production increased, prices dropped significantly, making a new world of inexpensive confections available to the consumer.
Penny candy, sold mainly to children, was the mainstay of many candy stores' business, and merchants competed actively for the children's pennies. Candy was marketed to entertain as well as to gratify a sweet tooth and the presentation of even the cheapest sweets became more and more elaborate: these catalogs include molds for fruit drops in dozens of shapes. These were the simplest of confections: made from boiled and flavored sugar and cranked out by the hundreds on machines originally modeled after the printing press. The catalogs also show molds for "sugar toys," another entertaining confection made cheaply from simple boiled and flavored sugar.
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