The printed catalogues of all sorts of assortment, together with the company’s agencies in the centres of the European or world markets served as a basic support for securing sales of products, which had to be up against tough international competition. However, not many have been preserved in the archive of the company Rona a.s.
The torso of the original volume includes just catalogues of tableware and beverage glass, moulded glass, lightings or common utilitarian assortment, preserved more or less by chance. The photograph albums documenting lampshades coming from the 1990s (see the list of catalogues) also shows interesting sets.
The list of digitized catalogues:
How the catalogues were used
A printed catalogue was a working instrument, not a souvenir. It travelled with the representative, it sat in the office of the agency, and it was marked up in pencil as orders were placed. The plates therefore had to be unambiguous: every item carried a number, a size in centimetres or in inches according to the market, and a note of the finishes in which it could be supplied. Prices were normally issued on a separate loose sheet so that the plates themselves could outlive several price revisions.
Because catalogues were reissued rather than rewritten, comparing successive editions is one of the most reliable ways of dating the assortment. A shape that appears in one edition and is gone from the next was withdrawn; a shape that reappears with a new number was usually remoulded. Whole sections were sometimes lifted unchanged from an earlier edition, which is why a plate style can be a decade older than the cover it sits behind.
The editions gathered here cover pressed table glass, cut and engraved services, and the separate lighting-glass assortment that the firm catalogued on its own. Supplementary plates issued between editions are included where they have survived, since they often record short-lived patterns that never reached a bound catalogue at all.
  Beleuchtungsglas.pdf | [ ] | 4678 Kb |
| Beleuchtungsglas_1.pdf | [ ] | 3461 Kb |
| Beleuchtungsglas_1909.pdf | [ ] | 1397 Kb |
| Beleuchtungsglas_1915.pdf | [ ] | 4786 Kb |
| Beleuchtungsglas_1927.pdf | [ ] | 2790 Kb |
| Beleuchtungsglas_1930.pdf | [ ] | 2280 Kb |
| Beleuchtungsglas_1936.pdf | [ ] | 1798 Kb |
| Beleuchtungsglas_GISUN.pdf | [ ] | 2776 Kb |
| Beleuchtungsglas_No20.pdf | [ ] | 898 Kb |
| Beleuchtungsglas_No100.pdf | [ ] | 2884 Kb |
| Beleuchtungsglas_Tafel_1-26.pdf | [ ] | 2762 Kb |
| Beleuchtungsglas_Tafel_101-125.pdf | [ ] | 2968 Kb |
| Beleuchtungsglas_Tafel_242-263.pdf | [ ] | 2277 Kb |
| Gräberartikel.pdf | [ ] | 2292 Kb |
| Luster.pdf | [ ] | 5279 Kb |
| Pressglas_1915.pdf | [ ] | 5517 Kb |
| Pressglas_1934.pdf | [ ] | 1395 Kb |
| Pressglas_1937.pdf | [ ] | 1889 Kb |
| Service_1.pdf | [ ] | 1897 Kb |
| Service_2.pdf | [ ] | 2300 Kb |
| Service_1927.pdf | [ ] | 2788 Kb |
| Service_1932.pdf | [ ] | 5073 Kb |
| Service_1934.pdf | [ ] | 3504 Kb |
| Service_1936.pdf | [ ] | 4671 Kb |
| Schankgläser.pdf | [ ] | 900 Kb |
| Schleifglas_1937.pdf | [ ] | 1491 Kb |
| Tischglas.pdf | [ ] | 16816 Kb |
| Tischglas_1.pdf | [ ] | 4183 Kb |