Customer Reviews

All-American Ads of the 50s

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Taschen does it again! An amazing book of 928 pages with 1400 illustrations. The material is arranged in ten chapters and each has dozens of relevant magazine ads. What I particularly liked about this massive volume was the way all this colorful material has been handled, not a singe ad has been angled or overlapped on another. Here the pace is generated by running one ad over a spread, enlarging a section over a spread (basically for creative purposes) having one ad per page or in a minority of cases running four ads on a page. I think the designers took the view that reading the ad copy was as important as looking at all the amazing pictures. I also liked the range of material, besides the obvious consumer product advertising there are plenty of trade ads from the commercial sector. Stunning though this material is I do have a couple of minor objections, a few of the ads do have text that has run off the page and I would have prefered to see a thin black line define the edge of the ads where they are four to the page. This is the first volume of a series that will cover All-American ads of past decades and if they are all is good as this book it will be an incredible collection.

UPDATE My review originally appeared with the 928 page edition of this wonderful book and Amazon have also placed it with a mini paperback edition but you can still get original from some Marketplace Sellers. ISBN 3822811580.

On reading quite a bit about this book online before ordering, I was convinced that All American Ads of the 50s so thoroughly matched my interests that it was going to be the last book I would have to buy for a while, and certainly the last book on this subject. --Wouldn't it be nice if life really WAS that simple? This book is the ultimate vault of old ad gold, and one is hesitant to criticize at all. But...

The one thing about All American Ads that really bugs me is the big grainy blowups that fill too many spreads here. The full page ads are joys forever. But jumping back and forth between creamy, crisp, photographically reduced perfection of reproduction on one hand, and overextended, grainy enlargements of detail on the other makes for a somewhat disjoint experience.

This one gripe aside, it is a book you absolutely MUST have if you care about old ads and old popular and sociopolitical culture.

This is an absolutely fabulous series -- I eagerly anticipate the remaining volumes. Certainly they are excellent and enjoyable volumes for people interested in American design and popular culture, but I'm also finding them a great way to start teaching my young daughter about American history. Looking at 1950s liquor ads led to a discussion of Prohibition, which led to a discussion of gangster movies, and why everything in the 50s was trying to look like a rocket while consumer items of the 30s and 40s were rounded and "streamlined..." and so on.

It's a great way for children to realize that clues about history (and the hidden agendas of marketers, for that matter) are everywhere around us, and that while wars and the deeds of the great are part of history, there's more to it than that.

Probably the best ad book I've ever seen! Worth every penny it costs and believe me, it doesn't cost THAT much - not for a book like this! I was born in the 50s (in Russia) and Russians wouldn't even dream (or didn't even hear!) of products which are in this book - advertised in the US in the 50s. I'm now waiting for my All-American Ads of the 60s to arrive from Amazon - I spent my childhood in the US in the 60s and I can't wait to meet my "good old friends" - the American products - as advertised in the 60s. I'm hoping to collect the whole series of these fabulous books. Thank you very much, Jim Heimann and Benedikt Taschen -the guys who made this wonderfull series possible. Alexander Romanov, Moscow, Russia.

I loved this book! As a child born in the mid-50's, many of these ads fortunately carried over to the 60's when I was both better able to comprehend as well as recall them. It was also nice showing the book to our children, as it gave them a glimpse into some of what our own childhood's were like. If anyone reading this wants to take a trip back to a simpler, safer, saner era, this book is your "Time Machine". All for around $25 bucks too!

The book begins by noting that the 1950s were perceived as very different from the 1930s and 1940s--and advertisements reflected this. The book begins by noting: "And the future looked good. At least as seen through the eyes of television, magazines, and advertising."

The heart of this book is simple--advertisements from the 1950s. The book reproduces many of these, from automobiles (Pontiac and Ford-including an Edsel ad!-and Oldsmobile and Cadillac and Buick and. . . .) to gasoline (Mobilgas [never knew that Mobil was so called!], Texaco [The Texas Company]) to stamps (remember those? Here, we see Top Value stamps).

Other ads? Sheaffer's Snorkel pens, Lady Sunbeam hair dryer, GE stove, Admiral refrigerator, Lionel Trains, movies (e.g., The Seven Little Foys, Vertigo, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), Arrow shirts, Jockey underwear, Sealtest Ice Cream.

A lot of fun getting a sense of the products and the advertising and marketing approaches of the 1950s. The one downside? The Introduction really does not provide much context for the ads that follow. It would have been helpful to readers had there been such a treatment.

There are many reasons to look backwards. For one, it may help to figure out where one is by looking at where one has been. For another, one might rethink where one is going by looking at the ideals and goals of the past. One might assess societies as a whole in some grand way, such as its military budget or the outcome of elections, but for us common folk, there is no way to tell what is on our minds better than a look at what we are buying. This book is an absolutely fascinating compendium of the culture of the 50's - of our desires, our habits, our values, as told in its advertisements. On one level it is an amusing recollection of what we once thought was cool. On another it is a profound study of the sociology of America in a time of idealism and innocence. I saw many, if not most of these ads myself when they were originally published.

That being said, I must add that the recollection of the feelings I had at that time is not entirely comfortable. On this other level, that of gut feelings, the book can be is a compendium of an appeal to the senses, to a culture of need, of having. One must look pretty deep to find any spiritual values here, and I think that the conspicuous absense of any moral sense is what is most interesting about it. Perhaps the most important lesson to be learned by those of us who look back is that the promises of those who offer us happiness by just one more purchase are really empty. Read this and be nostalgic, amused, reflective, and, just maybe, a little sad.

If you're looking for a book to compliment "Mad Men", this is it. In these pages are the types of ads Don Draper and his crew at Sterling Cooper are creating. Forget any of the "official" tie in books to the show. Get this one, and its cousin: "All American Ads of the 60s."

Stir up a martini, fire up your Lucky Strikes and keep these on your coffee table for perusal.

Massive, beautifully produced, and very insightful in it's appraisal of 1950's American consumerism, this tome is perhaps the best collection of 1950's advertising ever assembled. Tons of beautiful illustrations and (in some cases) graphic design that are now relics of the past. In my opinion, this book should only have been published in harcover, due to its weight and number of pages. Sadly the hardcover is impossible or nearly impossible to find, unless you go for the abridged version issued as "The Golden Age of Advertising- the 1950s." This whole series of books which now span most of the 20th century are a great reference, and an important documentation of American history in visual form.

Over a 1000 full color adverts from cake mix to cars to computers. If you're a designer looking for inspiration, a historian looking for insight, a collector looking for the original advert for that piece of 50's kitsch you just bought, or you just like the 50's look, get this book. It's so huge I keep finding new stuff every time I leaf through it. I loved the ads for 1950's office computers.