1906 Hats
Description: In 1906 the first "W. T. Grant Co. 25 Cent Store" opened in Lynn, Massachusetts. Modest profit, coupled with a fast turnover of inventory, allowed the stores to grow to almost $100 million annual sales by 1936. By the time Grant died in 1972 at age 96, his chain of W. T. Grant Stores had grown to almost 1,200. At the company's end, headquarters were atop One Astor Plaza, a prominent building of New York City's skyline on Times Square. Grant's stores were slower than others to adapt to the growth of the suburbs and the change in shopping habits that this entailed, and the attempt to correct this was belated. W. T. Grant's bankruptcy in 1976, which was the then-second biggest in US history.
Description: Illustrated by Brazilian artist Henrique Alvim Corrêa for the French 1906 edition of War of the Worlds. From the Public Domain Review website, “‘Alvim Corrêa’, Wells said after the artist had died, ‘did more for my work with his brush than I with my pen’.” Presented here with my own humble flourishes.
