All American Ads of the 20's

Rating:
Summary: Shifting the goods with art.
Review:

This is the final title in Taschen's beautiful six-volume All-American ads series. Despite the contents being at least seventy years old there is plenty to enjoy in the six hundred plus pages. Unlike the other volumes the most noticeable thing is the lack of color photos, illustrations provided the imagery and this is why I found the book so interesting, the range of styles is amazing. The ninety-four car ad pages show the product in precise (though exaggerated) detail, the hundred pages of Fashion and Beauty ads range from hard, flat graphics to pure whimsy and the Food and Beverage pages, where most of the ads have a package somewhere which had to be painted. No color photo pack-shots here. I did find two color photos, least I assume they are, for Buick (page 132) and Agfa (page 314) and imagine they must have been some of the very earliest examples of commercial color photography.

Predictably most of the ads are rather staid in their design, small headlines, plenty of copy and a picture but this throws up several eye-catching ads, Marmon cars, Celotex building products, Hart Schaffner and Marx clothing or the very graphic designs for the National Association of Book Publishers. If you like to read copy you'll be pleased to see the famous 1923 Jordan cars ad 'Somewhere West of Laramie' which ran in the June 23 Saturday Evening Post and at the time made quite an impact on the public.

The book is beautifully printed and illustrators, in particular, will really enjoy the range of styles in these ads. Other buyers will want this last edition to complete the set. The six books (weighing in at thirty-two pounds with 4758 pages) probably have well over five thousand ads and show a fascinating history of American consumer culture.