Antique Celluloid Easter Pinback, He Is Risen, Baptist Publication Society

There is a particular kind of Easter Sunday that belongs to an earlier generation of American churchgoing: a Sunday school classroom filled with children in their best clothes, a teacher handing out small round pins as a reward for good attendance or simply as a keepsake of the day, and a child pinning that little button to a lapel or a dress with real pride, wearing it out the church doors and into the spring afternoon. This small celluloid button, printed with lilies, a flowering cross, and the words "Easter" and "He Is Risen," is exactly that kind of keepsake, a small, cheerful piece of religious history meant to be worn once and treasured for decades after.

The button itself is a lovely example of the celluloid pinback technique that dominated small badge-making in the early twentieth century: a domed, glossy celluloid surface stretched over a metal disc, printed in rich color with a decorated cross wrapped in blue and white flowers and a red ribbon bow, surrounded by white Easter lilies and green foliage on a soft cream ground, with "EASTER" curving gracefully along the bottom edge and "HE IS RISEN" along the top. It is a genuinely pretty design, more detailed and carefully composed than the simple text-only buttons that were common in this category, and the celluloid dome gives the whole image a soft, glassy shine that catches the light beautifully.

We looked closely at every part of this button, front and back, and found no manufacturer's trademark on the piece itself. What we did find, though, is something arguably more interesting: printed right on the paper backing insert, visible through the reverse, is "American Baptist Publication Society, Philadelphia," with additional branch cities listed alongside it. This was a real, well-documented Baptist publishing organization founded in 1824, and this button was almost certainly produced as a premium or giveaway item for their Sunday school programs, distributed to churches and classrooms around the country. We are telling you honestly that this identifies the sponsoring organization rather than the actual button manufacturer, whose name doesn't appear anywhere on the piece, but it gives this little button a real, traceable institutional history that most anonymous celluloid pins simply don't have.

We want to walk through this button's condition carefully and honestly. The celluloid dome itself is fully intact, with no cracks, splits, or delamination anywhere that we could find under close inspection, which is genuinely good news for a piece this age, since celluloid can be fragile and prone to exactly that kind of damage over a century. The cream background has taken on an even, soft amber toning that is simply what celluloid does as it ages, not a flaw so much as a fingerprint of time. There is a small reddish-brown spot near the base of the ribbon, likely light foxing or oxidation, worth knowing about even though it's minor. The back shows some scattered dark tarnish spots along the crimped metal rim and a bit of soiling on the paper backing itself, along with some fine dust and fiber caught under the edge. We want to be upfront about one more thing: we could not clearly confirm the presence or condition of the actual pin fastener on the back in every photograph, so please look closely at the images yourself, and know that we would rather flag this honestly than have you assume more than the photos actually show.

There is something quietly moving about a piece like this, a small object made to be worn for a single joyful morning that instead survived, intact and legible, for well over a century. Collectors of religious ephemera, Sunday school memorabilia, and early celluloid pinback buttons specifically look for pieces exactly like this one: colorful, well-preserved, and carrying real, confirmable publisher information rather than being a generic, unidentifiable trinket. The American Baptist Publication Society connection in particular gives this piece a genuine research thread for anyone interested in the history of American religious publishing and Sunday school culture.

We priced this button by comparing it against similar early-1900s celluloid religious and Sunday school pinback buttons of comparable size and design complexity, and we leaned toward the higher end of that comparison range, since this piece combines a genuinely detailed, multi-color design with a legible, unusual, and real institutional back-mark, two things that plainer, unmarked buttons in this category simply don't offer.

Please look closely at every photograph before you decide, and please check the pin mechanism yourself if that detail matters to you, since we want to be completely upfront about what we could and couldn't confirm from the images. If you have any questions at all, we are glad to answer honestly rather than have you guess. It will be packaged carefully and shipped promptly. Thank you for taking a moment to consider this small, cheerful survivor of somebody's long-ago Easter Sunday, and we hope it finds its way into a collection where its story keeps being told.

 _gsrx_vers_1736 (GS 9.9.5 (1736))

Item specifics

From The Spiderpunk Web collection of authentic antiques and collectibles. Ships from the United States with tracking.