Small Industrial Landscapes: Business Letterheads as Cultural Heritage

Abstract

Letterheads are the abstraction of the character of a company, whether it is manufacturing or services, whose function is to project its identity. The design of the letterhead generally expresses the greatness of the company and its manufacturing facilities, with the aim of showing its category, importance and position in the market. Many of these letterheads, in addition to including in them the name of the company and the owner, plus its location, depicted the companies’ buildings and the environment in which they were located, this way creating small industrial landscapes. In the Historical Archive of the Metepec Industrial Museum, thousands of copies of issued and received letters, between 1918 and 1967, are stored in the documentary collection of the Compañía Industrial de Atlixco S.A. For this paper, a selection of letters with business letterheads that show industrial landscapes has been made, to generate a corpus of images with the aim of making an iconographic reading, as well as putting them in value as an important and interesting industrial graphic heritage.