Meek Stock: 68 "Asters"

General
No. 68 is another holdover from the Thayer folio (La Grande Flora de Colorado de Montana) that Meek acquired in 1901 or 1902 and from which Meek produced designs No. 32 to No. 35 (The Wild Rose; the Evening Primrose; the Tiger Lily; and the Rocky-Mountain Thimble Berry). This one also carries a 1901 copyright date (date of the original Thayer publication), as well as the No. 68 and the Meek logo, which appears twice—once by the copyright date and once by the stock number. To our knowledge, this and No. 67 are the only designs where the Meek symbol appears twice.

So, now we have a sixth floral design from the Thayer folio despite a lack of evidence that the designs were well received as advertising trays. One wonders why Meek, who owned the copyright didn’t produce other novelty advertising items better suited to the retail trade using the designs from Thayer. At least we have not encountered any.

Shape & Rim & Ad Text
All of the examples we’ve encountered are 13” convex pie trays. The rim is light green with blue and violet/pink asters on the lower half. This design also brings back the rim vignette, although only a single one at the 6 o’clock position. It features what appears to be a formal garden with path and gazebo with a subtle art nouveau outline more typical of Kaufmann & Strauss designs. We’ve seen one example with gold advertising text on the rim and one with black text. Like No. 67, we suspect this design would have appealed more to smaller retailers and examples of which likely would have had advertising text printed on the back.

Hager & Price
This design does not appear in Hager’s article, nor does Sahling mention it in his workbook. We have only seen a single brewery example (Ryan’s), but not on an auction site, so we have no pricing information. The non-brewery and stock sample versions we have seen have gone for relatively modest prices.