H. C. MINER LITHO COMPANY

H. C. Miner Litho Company of New York was started in 1896 and operated by H. C. Miner and his son H. C. Miner Jr. They were reorganized in 1908 with a new president, Hugo Zigfield and continued operation until 1935.

They were primarily used by United Artists and Fox for their lithography work.

Notice the numbers inside the circle on their logo and the differences in printing just below their logo.

1916-1922 logo notice nothing underneath
1925-1929 logo underneath reads ' made in U.S.A.'
1929-1935 logo underneath reads 'lithographed in U.S.A.'

Here's a Puzzle???

We've gathered tags and logos from Miner and there seems to be a discrepancy..

Notice this tag from 1915:

Notice the hand written look of the tag. This came from a 1915 window card titled 'A Fool There Was'.

 

Here's where the controversy comes in...

Now here's a tag line from the Hell's Angels window card in 1930:

Notice the same basic hand-written style print. It's quite common for the name to be modified over the years.... Morgan Litho changed theirs 2 times BUT you normally don't change the spelling of the LAST NAME???

Minor OR Miner..... BOTH are written well enough that there is NO mistaking the print..

We have checked lithographer records for that time period and can NOT find ANY record of a Minor Litho... The only explanation that we have been able to get from talking with some historians is that ... at that time, there were a massive amount of immigrants in the US that did NOT write English well, and that it was fairly common for misspelling to occur????????

If there's anyone out there that can shed some light on this, please let us know...

Here's a list of posters we have in our MPDB for Miner Litho