The Duke University Library has a very interesting exhibition currently on their website titled as is the title of this article.

The exhibit presents over 9,000 images, with database information, relating to the early history of advertising in the United States. The materials, drawn from the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University, provide a significant and informative perspective on the early evolution of this most ubiquitous feature of modern American business and culture.

The project was made possible by Duke’s Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History which has been active in building research collections in its topic fields since 1992 and was funded in part by grants to the University from Ameritech.

The items are from eleven categories dating from the mid 1800s to the 1920s as follows:

• Advertising Ephemera Collection
• Broadsides Collection
• Nicole Di Bona Peterson Collection of Advertising Cookbooks
• Early Advertising Publications
• J. Walter Thompson Company “House Ads”
• Ellis Collection of Kodakiana
• Lever Brothers’ Lux Soap (Flakes)
• R. C. Maxwell Company Collection
• Pond’s
• Scrapbooks
• Tobacco Advertising

If you have any interest in vintage advertising, as I do, then this collection will surely be worth viewing.  The ad shown to above (click any picture to enlarge) is perhaps as pertinent today as it was back in 1921.  It’s a color pamphlet from the Keeley Institute in Greensboro, SC and the caption reads “The Beautiful Romance of life never blooms in the morass liquor or drug addiction”.  Inside the pamphlet were several sewing needles and a needle threader.

Perhaps equally as interesting today is the ad on the left which reads in part: “The widespread and rapily increasing defalcations among trusted bank officers and employees emphasizes the fact that banks everywhere need the protection offered by United States Fidelity and Guaranty Company of Baltimore, Md.

I’ll leave you finally with this ad which speaks for itself.  It claims that it is “specially made for the cure of the weakness peculiar to Men” and “electricity rightly applied produces marvelous results”.  I’ll take their word for it!

You can visit the Duke Library by clicking here.

I’m Tom Murphy and thanks for helping me give Ephemera the encore it deserves.

Tom
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