Vintage Advertising – An A to Z

This is a good basic introduction to an important subject - one that deserves a lot more attention than it usually gets from historians. After all, we live in a consumer society and that society is shaped by advertising. The illustrations are excellent, because they reach well beyond the usual suspects - the Shell, Bovril and Bisto posters that we have all seen on a thousand fridge magnets. They are drawn from the magisterial John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera at the Bodleian Library and the author is the Collection's curator. Who better to lead us down this winding historical path to the genesis of retailing? That said, I have a beef. All the illustrations in this book are also contained in the same author's more compendious The Art of Advertising. So if you are going to buy one or the other, go for the latter. And a lesser beef: neither of these books addresses one of the most important elements of modern advertising: the application of the photographic image to advertising in all its print media - posters, point-of-sale, newspaper ads, magazine ads, stuffers, direct mail, catalogues, brochures etc. It has a longer history than most would expect, dating back to the 1850s for posters and the 1880s for press. Now it dominates printed advertising and its story deserves to be told.