by cowdery » Mon Jul 06, 2009 8:33 pm
There were a couple of different iterations of that Early Times advertising sign. The picture posted in this thread is a later version. I'm quite sure I know the one to which the original poster is referring. It is an advertising sign and basically depicts the brand's label at that time, in high relief. The Getz museum has one. It is quite large, about 4-feet tall as I recall. I tried just now to find a picture of it and couldn't locate one. It's not reproduced very often because it shows whiskey being made in a long cabin by what appear to be black laborers, who may be slaves. Some people who have these signs have made the race of the laborers white. I think the distillery may even have put one out that did that. Then in later versions, like the one posted, they de-emphasized the figures, but they're clearly white. In the original, if I remember correctly, one figure is driving an ox cart while the other is doing something in front of the cabin, I forget what.
I'm not sure when the first version of that sign was made and, obviously, any potential buyer would want to know that. Most of that sort of thing, if it's pre-pro, would be from right around the turn of the century. Just 'pre-1923' isn't enough information. I assume that's just Brown-Forman's way of saying, "we didn't do it," as they bought the brand in 1923. I don't know if those signs were produced over some period of time or what the poster even means by "original," though there were different versions done over time so I would consider the first iteration to be the "original." It wouldn't be a one-of-a-kind but it would have been produced in a limited edition, just for very good accounts.
This is certainly the sort of thing people buy and sell on eBay and it's entirely legal to do so, unlike the traffic in full bottles. Inquiring about it here was not too fruitful because the people who collect or otherwise covet old advertising signs -- even of whiskey -- aren't necessarily whiskey enthusiasts. As one poster noted, most of us spend our money on whiskey, not memorabilia.