I like old things. Pretty much anything old. Thus I am starting a series called Old is Good. First off: ads.
Times and social mores change. The beer ad to the left wouldn’t fly now – omg it has a boobie in it! No more beer for health, either. No more beer for babies. We’ve come a long way when it comes to advertising – haven’t we?
Sign from a mason's place of business, in Pompeii.
1806 ad for a traditional medicine. For bad knee joints?
Beautiful colour proof for a beer ad, Wiedemann's, ca. 1880. Are they reading a strangely print-free letter? Admiring some particularly successful hand-hemming on a handkerchief? Whatever it is, let's celebrate with a beer!
1926 ad for Margaret Sanger's book on birth control. Very ballsy for its day.
12% alcohol. "Directions: A wine glass full before or after meals and on retiring or at direction of the physician." And if Baby got a little of it, well, it wouldn't be anything new in the history of parenting.
Not needed at my house :^ (
Interesting that she has a lady-like little, what, 8oz glass? Not like our present-day 20oz gut-busters.
Very contrasty to how beer is advertised now.
May I bring to your attention "a sure remedy for worms" and the fact that it is an expectorant, which makes you cough up... whatever it is you got inside you that needs coughed up.
Never mind that the rust-proofing and the engine were rubbish.
NO WAY the gentleman's shirt-button is meant to suggest a nipple. Nope, no way, none at all.
It's a tobacco ad. With a pipe-smoking baby. Flying around on a large bee. Ooooh-kay.
So many ways to interpret this. Is the workman afraid the soldier will take his job away? Is the soldier resentful that the worker didn't join the fight? Will there be a job for the soldier (always, throughout history, an issue when a war ends)?
Ancient joke: they've been married so long they're on their second bottle of Tabasco. Anyone know which opera they're referring to?
1974 ad for a teletype machine. Used as a printing terminal with computers in the early 1970s. According to the Wiki entry, "Bill Gates and Paul Allen used one with a PDP-8 minicomputer when they attended Lakeside High School in Seattle. The model 33 printed upper case letters at 10 characters per second, it did not do 3-D color graphics. The ASR versions could store data and programs on paper tape; the punch/reader is shown on the left side. An optional 300-baud modem could be installed on the right side. The paper tape, modem and printed output made this an ideal terminal for accessing remote computers. In 1975 a new ASR sold for around $1500."
