Mollie Bailey Print

For those of you who can get lost in a serif, and enjoy type that seems to move, stretch and grow right before your eyes, this one sheet from around 1920, advertising the Mollie Bailey Show, is a feast!

Mollie Kirkland [Bailey] was born and raised in Alabama, and married into show life when she eloped with Gus Bailey, a cornet player in the circus, in 1858. Together with two siblings, Gus and Mollie formed the Bailey Family Troupe and performed vaudeville-style shows throughout the south until the Civil War, when Gus became a bandmaster, and Mollie a nurse. After the war, they toured a bit on riverboats, and then retooled the show as The Bailey Circus, based out of Texas, in 1879. Shortly thereafter, Gus became ill, so Mollie took over the show herself, and renamed it the Mollie A. Bailey Show, and ran it until a year before her death, in 1918.

The wood printing block used to produce this one sheet would have been carved sometime in the early 20^th century, but it was carved to carry on the style of the earlier advertising art the shop created for Mollie Bailey shows, featuring the hand-lettered style that was a mainstay of the late 19^th and early 20^th century advertising.

Designer's Notes

• Size: 26" x 40"
• Letterpress print.
• Handmade in Nashville, Tennessee.