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Category: Advertising

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Featured Advertisement: a 1914 Thanksgiving Shoppers Guide

Posted by: Ellen Terrell

Every Thanksgiving people stock up on the food and ingredients they will need for their feasts.  Because retailers want shoppers, and their goal is to let people know what they have and what deals are to be had, special fliers are run in newspapers and commercials are aired on television. This advertisement from the Rock …

Black and white drawing of three men playing hockey from the cover Spalding's How to Play Hockey

King of Winter Sports

Posted by: Jennifer Harbster

For the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics Games I wrote about an exhibit I created of ‘classic’ winter sport and game books (1800-1950) in the post  He Shoots, He Scores: A Love of Winter Games. In this post I mentioned that the Library has been involved in digitization of its pre-1923 U.S. monograph imprint collection. Over the …

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Featured Advertisement: Buy Useful Presents!

Posted by: Ellen Terrell

On Thanksgiving Day I received with my newspaper a hefty amount of fliers from various retailers all touting their Christmas bargains.  Advertising for Christmas shopping isn’t exactly a new concept, but what I find interesting is the evolution of the buying season and the tricks advertisers have used in their advertisements to influence shopper behavior. …

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Featured Advertisement: Electricity!

Posted by: Ellen Terrell

While doing research I got distracted by this wonderful advertisement published in the New York Tribune on October 5, 1920. It was an advertisement from the New York Edison Company touting the benefits of electricity, mostly for efficiency and safety, for businesses. But what really caught my attention was the hand drawn caricatures, for lack …

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Civil War Sesquicentennial: Prices & Salaries

Posted by: Ellen Terrell

As part of a short series with the Sesquicentennial as a jumping off point, I used the 1860 Census in an earlier post as a way to find out more about the people living at the time of the Civil War.  In this second post I wanted to show how Business staff might answer a …

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Cockles, Motto Lozenges, and Sweethearts

Posted by: Jennifer Harbster

I was recently at a dinner party where the gracious hostess embellished the dining room table with Sweethearts, also known as Conversation Hearts and Sweet Talks. As you can imagine, the guests questioned the history of these sweethearts and turned to me for an answer. I promised that when I returned to the Library that …