In the course of a work project, I discovered, to my surprise, that I had online access to scanned images of every single LA Times newspaper from the mid-80s all the way back to 1886. Of course, I’ve squandered away a bit of time since then, perusing the paper from my birthdate, the birthdate of friends and family, etc. And then I decided to see what things looked like in the paper 100 years ago today.
One of the best things about this access is that, in addition to the news stories, I’m also able to look at all the ads that were in the paper. Yes, I’m a giant dork for finding this all so amusing, but so be it.
Anyway, I just wanted to share the text of my favorite ad from April 25, 1907 regarding the best-named product ever:
When I was a kid my local library had issues of the local newspaper going all the way back to the 1890s on microfilm. I used to spend hours just browsing through them. I remember being fascinated by the ads for corsets.
I’ve been reading through and cataloging images from a collection of Steiglitz’ Camera Work magazine for a museum internship, and I’ve been loving the ads. Here’s one from the first issue, January 1903:
[all caps and italics preserved]
First of all, dig that wonderful pompus wording- shades of Plumtree’s Potted Meat, and secondly, the ‘readers of Camera Work’ didn’t even exist when the ad copy was written- a clear attempt at self-fulfilling prophecy, huh?
The newspaper I work for recently, within the past few years, inherited bound copies of the paper from over a hundred years ago. Amazing to look at.
Also amazing…we have this section called Pages from the Past. The guy who did it did it from the 1940’s until a few months ago when he died. His children do it now. A snippet from this day out of the Appeal from 120 years ago, 100 years ago, 70 years ago, 50 years ago, 20 years ago and 10 years ago is put in. I have to format them and get them ready for the paper. Amazing to read; about 120 years ago there was a huge Anti-Chinese sentiment that’s fascinating to read about.
The ads, of course, were interesting. To say the least.
When I was a kid, I wrote a school report on the erecting of the Statue of Liberty. I went to the local library where they had our small town’s newspaper on microfilm going back to the very first issue in the early 1800s to see if there were any articles in the paper when it was built. I found what I was looking for, but even better I found a full-page ad for a circus along theselines. It was a gorgeous thing with all kinds of intricate animals and grand text. I wish I’d had a way to copy and print it, it was pretty awesome.
VD and premarital/extramarital sex ran rampant during the Civil War. In some regiments more than half the men were infected with a STD, sometimes fatally, and unplanned pregnancies were also very common. The advertisements from this period are absolutely fascinating- read any issue of the NY Times from the war years and you’ll see constant advertisements for
Absolutely fascinating. Without saying “get rid of unwanted pregancies” or abortifacient or “cure gonorrhea without your husband finding out”, they manage to say exactly those things REPEATEDLY in the same issue- sometimes there are three or four whole columns of these ads. The scary thing is that there was no such thing as the FDA at this time to oversee these patent medicines or a Health Dept. that licensed people “removing obstructions to female regularity” there’s no way of knowing how many women died or were rendered barren or just got violently ill and were out $5 in addition to still be pregnant or syphiletic due to some truly immoral or incompetent.
Although the Jordan Motor Car Company is long gone, this ad for the Playboy roadster lives on as a classic. Although it’s full of text, it also heralded the transition from the selling of the product to the marketing of a carefully-crafted image.
I have several thousand MP3’s of old radio shows. It’s downright eerie to hear radio advertisements talking about which brand of cigarettes is recommended by four out of five doctors.
You can see these same “cures” in the 1897 Sears Catalog (available as a reprint.) The wording is intentionally vague, especially in comparison to the lengthy ads in which the pills claim to cure a wide variety of ailments. One which springs instantly to mind is a small ad for “ladies’ pills”. If you take the instructed dosage, “all will be well.”
I’d imagine a lot of these later ads were so carefully worded to avoid running afoul of the Comstock Laws.
Not an ad, but an article. However, it’s my thread, so I shall hijack as I see fit. This is from April 26, 1907. I’d love for someone to try to parse what actually took place in this story, since there’s a key phrase within that clearly meant something different then than it does to us now.
