Vintage Coopers Western Wear Advertising Wood Boot Jack, c. 1940–1975

The Piece

A wooden boot jack made to be given away by a Western wear store, and made properly rather than cheaply. A long tapered board carries a deep V notch at one end, and a short riser block glued and fastened beneath it lifts that end off the floor so a heel can be levered out of a boot without bending down.

The notch is lined with saddle leather, wrapped over both edges and stapled through, so the jack grips a boot heel rather than scarring it. That lining is the detail that separates a working boot jack from a novelty.

Across the standing end is a panel of the same tan leather, stapled flat, printed in black with the Coopers logo: heavy slab letters set inside a band of zigzag diamonds, with Western and Casual Wear beneath. The leather has darkened and taken a soft sheen from handling, and the print is crisp and fully legible.

Along one side of the riser the wood is branded PAT. PEND. The board is a clear vertical grain softwood with tight straight figure, finished light so the grain reads, and a strip of black leather is stapled along the bottom of the riser to stop it walking on a hard floor.

History & Provenance

The advertising is the provenance. Coopers Western and Casual Wear was a Western wear retailer, and this is a store promotional piece: the sort of object a shop ordered by the dozen with its name on it and handed to customers who had just bought boots. The store has not been located to a particular town, and no address, telephone number or postal code appears anywhere on the panel to place it, so no claim is made about where it traded.

The PAT. PEND. brand tells you more than it first appears. It means the jack itself was a manufactured product with a patent application filed on its design, not something knocked together in a back room, and that a maker was selling this form to stores for imprinting. It is the jack that was patent pending, not the shop.

The dating rests on the advertising and on the stock. The phrase Western and Casual Wear as a shop category, and the heavy slab lettering set in a zigzag diamond band, belong to the decades when Western wear ran well beyond working ranch supply into general fashion retail. The board is clear vertical grain softwood with tight straight figure, which is old growth stock of a quality that grew scarce and expensive through the later twentieth century, and that argues against a late date rather than for one.

Every leather element is fastened with wire staples. Wire stitching and bench stapling were commercial from around the turn of the twentieth century and in ordinary use for leather and light goods well before the war, so the staples set a broad floor rather than a narrow one and should not be read as a late marker.

No address, no patent number and no country of origin appears on the piece. That sets no boundary of its own and nothing has been read into it. A granted patent number would have narrowed the range considerably, and its absence is consistent with the application still being pending when this run was made.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A boot jack is one of the few antiques that still does its job better than anything made since. If you wear boots, this lives by the back door and earns its place every day, and the leather lining means it will not chew the heel of a good pair.

If you do not, it is a piece of Western graphic design that happens to be an object. The logo is bold, black on tan, and it photographs well leaned against a wall, laid on a console or hung on a peg in an entry.

For a shop it is the kind of thing that sells itself off a counter, because everyone knows what it is, most people have never owned one, and the advertising gives it a story the plain ones do not have.