Ault & Wiborg Company

The Ault & Wiborg Company was a manufacturer of printing inks that operated independently from 1878 to 1928. Founded in Cincinnati, Ohio, by Levi Addison Ault and Frank Bestow Wiborg, it expanded until its operations in multiple cities made it the world's largest ink manufacturer of its day.^[1]

Ault & Wiborg Company

Advertisement, ca. 1920
Company type	manufacturer
Founded	1878; 147 years ago (1878) in Cincinnati, United States
Founders	Levi Addison Ault, Frank Bestow Wiborg
Defunct	1928 (1928)
Fate	Merger
Successor	International Printing Ink Corp.
Products	printing inks

The firm prospered with the development of colored inks based on coal-dye tars and the introduction of lithography.^[1]

As part of its marketing efforts, the company commissioned elaborate posters and magazine advertisements, the latter particularly for The Printing Art and The Inland Printer. Among the artists who produced works for the company were Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (in 1896;^[2][3] he was also a customer, using the company's inks for his own works^[4]), Will H. Bradley (the "dean of American designers", he produced several dozen of the posters from 1895^[5] to about 1900); and Louis Rhead (at least one, in 1896^[6]). Many of these designs have been collected by noted institutions, including the National Museum of American History,^[7] Library of Congress,^[8] the Metropolitan Museum of Art,^[9] and more. In 1902, the company published a book reproducing some 100 of these posters.^[10]

Ault was still running Ault & Wiborg in 1928 when he sold his interest for $14 million ($256,370,000 today^[11]),^[1] allowing it to be merged with Queen City Printing Inks and Philip Ruxton Co. to form the International Printing Ink Corp.^[12] The company was renamed Interchemical Corp. in 1938.^[12] It was sold in 1968 to the Carrier Corporation and then in 1985 to BASF.^[13]

External links

• Poster Book, a 1902 book reproducing some 100 Ault & Wiborg posters
• Noted institutions that hold Ault & Wiborg posters in their collections include: University of Delaware,^[5] Boston Public Library,^[14] Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library,^[15] Chicago History Museum,^[16] and others.