Trade Sub-Collection

History of the Sub-Collection

A sub-collection dedicated to trade was registered in the CES in 2006. There had existed a project aimed at creating a museum of trade, but these plans came to a halt with the dissolution of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. The National Museum of Agriculture had been gradually gathering items related to the retail and sale of agricultural produce, and these items were included in the exposition at the Kačina Chateau near Kutná Hora. At that time, however, these items belonged to various sub-collections and it was only at this time, i.e. after the turn of the millennium, that the idea of creating a specialised trade sub-collection appeared. The trade sub-collection of the National Museum of Agriculture focuses on the retail of agricultural commodities, from their measuring and weighing all the way to the nature of payments. From its earliest times, when this sub-collection included only eight items transferred from other sub-collections, it gradually grew and came to include dozens of other items. Most items belonging to this sub-collection are related to shops that sold coffee and to coffee products (tin cans, coffee mills, roasting machines, or contemporary advertisement). The sub-collection also features objects related to pubs, such as pints and beer coasters. In addition to these, it also includes items related to various weighing systems, guild symbols, and tin advertisements. In recent years, the museum has been gradually adding also various weights and scales, period shop inventories, various storage containers and packaging, advertisements, and receipts, as well as other objects used not only in shops and markets but also those that document the atmosphere of trading and various kinds of retail especially in the nineteenth and twentieth century in the territory of the Czech Lands.