Vintage Moments: Tree Handbook Proves Useful for Education & Marketing

By Doug Dalsing
February/March 2012
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Booklet courtesy Bob Moffett

When marketing your business, it’s always wise to give your customers something useful to complement your products. Think branded beer can koozie or pen, but way more intelligent and useful. That’s what SC Johnson did with this “Handbook of American Trees and Wood Finishing,” published in 1936. The majority of its 50 pages is packed with biological details on 126 different trees, but it also outlines tree-themed games like “Tree Cribbage, in which you assign points to trees according to their rarity in your neighborhood,” and “Hidden Trees,” in which you hunt for tree names in sentences like “The rope broke so a knot was tied.” The fun never stops! Plus, tucked in the back are five pages with a product list and tips that surely answered wood finishing questions.

View a complete PDF of the handbook here.