ELIZABETH JOYCE BRODERICK
JLS traces its roots back to 1918 when Elizabeth Joyce Broderick, one
of America’s first female entrepreneurs, founded the Joyce Letter Shop
company. She first discovered the benefits of communicating through
direct mail while selling hay for her dad. The ability to quickly
sell her dad’s hay in record time with a small mailing was the
beginning of what was to become one of New England’s largest
direct communications companies.
The company flourished in Boston, even through the Depression, by rising
to every challenge and providing a diverse array of services with uncompromising
quality. As direct mail became a significant medium, the company began
serving both businesses and marketers. Over the years, Ms. Joyce built her
business by adding traditional lettershop services, addressing and inserting.
Mechanical innovations started to be developed in the 1930s to make life
easier and more profitable for letter shops. Today, you can see some of
this equipment in a unique mailing museum situated on premises at JLS
Mailing Services headquarters. In the early 1980s analog devices and ink
jet printers replaced this equipment, followed by the digital age in the
1990s with digital on-demand printing. Address and document information
that required entire rooms in which to house them now can be stored on a
device no bigger than your thumb. Processing equipment that weighed
thousands of pounds now can be done on a device that sits on a desk. JLS
was in the forefront of many of these innovations while preserving
personalization and high quality as practiced by Ms. Joyce.
JLS traces its roots back to 1918 when Elizabeth Joyce Broderick, one
of America’s first female entrepreneurs, founded the Joyce Letter Shop
company. She first discovered the benefits of communicating through
direct mail while selling hay for her dad. The ability to quickly
sell her dad’s hay in record time with a small mailing was the
beginning of what was to become one of New England’s largest
direct communications companies.
The company flourished in Boston, even through the Depression, by rising
to every challenge and providing a diverse array of services with uncompromising
quality. As direct mail became a significant medium, the company began
serving both businesses and marketers. Over the years, Ms. Joyce built her
business by adding traditional lettershop services, addressing and inserting.
Mechanical innovations started to be developed in the 1930s to make life
easier and more profitable for letter shops. Today, you can see some of
this equipment in a unique mailing museum situated on premises at JLS
Mailing Services headquarters. In the early 1980s analog devices and ink
jet printers replaced this equipment, followed by the digital age in the
1990s with digital on-demand printing. Address and document information
that required entire rooms in which to house them now can be stored on a
device no bigger than your thumb. Processing equipment that weighed
thousands of pounds now can be done on a device that sits on a desk. JLS
was in the forefront of many of these innovations while preserving
personalization and high quality as practiced by Ms. Joyce.
This museum is located adjoining the JLS headquarters building in Brockton. Known as the only museum in the country to showcase the history of the mailing industry, the Elizabeth Joyce Broderick Mailing Museum is a small museum which caters to school groups and those interested in the fascinating history of how the printing industry and the mail historically combined efforts to create today’s postal mail stream of materials – now heading into the digital age. Pictured below are just 3 of the multiple antique machines on display at the museum.
Figure 1 The wheel of a 1913 Golding Jobber – one of the earliest printing presses in the business
Figure 2 – Galley plates, which were used for printing presses when a pressman sets type in metal trays and lays out pagination etc.
Figure 3 – One of the original Joyce Letter Shop signs, which is still proudly on display in the Museum
Figure 4 – A replica inserter