Customer Reviews

All American Ads of the 20's (Midi Series)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I finally caved in and bought this volume in the _All-American Ads_ series, and now I'm going to have to buy the others. I'm doomed.

I'm in love with this book, and there's a lot to love about it. The production values are outstanding--the colors are brilliant, the images as crisp as they can be, and the selection of ads is wonderfully varied. It's a visual treat--Taschen has done it again.

If I do have one complaint, it is that the emphasis is on full-page, full-color ads. While I am a painter and find this book a visual delight (the colors! Oh, joy!), I'm also a geeky cultural historian. I've looked at a lot of magazines from the period--enough to know that some of the most telling ads about the anxieties, attitudes and preoccupations of the time aren't the largest, most sophisticated, or visually striking ones. But since this book has been produced primarily as a showcase for graphic design of the period, and not by hopeless history nerds, I have no trouble giving it five stars.

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.

Lots of hand drawn type. The pictures are happier and more whimsical than the 30's or 40's.

If you're into copying type, don't bother with the 60's -- the type is really boring. The 20's has one has everything from campy to elegant type... I'm looking forward to the release of the 00's-10's (turn of the century).

Very typical of this series, plenty of fascinating glossy magazine ads that capture the period as well as anything can. A really impressive series; I've got just about all of them. This one is more foreign than the others since it's period is now bordering on history, rather than just nostalgia.

At that time photography was not used in commercials. Beautifully ilustrated and full in text this book a real back to American Life Style in the 20's, throught products that made that age.