The Press: Ladies: 1833-1943

To the desks of U.S. admen last week went a 48-page, limited-edition booklet* tracing the foundation of a now flamboyant art: illustration of advertisements with eye-catching photos and drawings.

Pictures were used in the 1700s for the same reason that they are used today: to catch the eye of the reader and lure him into reading the ad. At first their use was infrequent, because they were too expensive. But in the early 1800s one Abel Bowen, engraver, produced a batch of stock woodcuts, laid them out for cheap sale to magazines, newspapers, etc.

His pictures (and those of imitators) were charmingly naive and generalized, and just as crude as the steel engravings produced by such famed commercial forbears as Boston’s Paul Revere. They were designed to fit every advertiser’s needs. There were pictures of bonnets for milliners, bottles for perfumers and brewers, elephants for circuses, fleeing figures for owners of runaway slaves, corsets for modistes, puffing trains for railroads.

There was also an assortment of dingbats that could be used by all who felt the first urgings of the adman’s decorative instinct: hands with pointing fingers, flower-&-ribbon arrangements, screaming American eagles. Publishers grabbed up these canned illustrations because they forced advertisers to increase the amount of space they bought or cut down the typographical composition in each ad, and therefore the labor cost. Advertisers used them because they liked them.

Interesting as a catalogue of commercial antiquity, the booklet is more fascinating as evidence of the enormous change in U.S. advertising art—for instance, in the use of eye-catching pretty girls.

Abel Bowen’s best, laid out in aid of a Philadelphia hair “manufactory” (wigs, transformations, etc.), was a woodcut of a forbidding female whose obviously enormous bust was well upholstered in yards of frills, and on whose head hair was heaped in a grotesque, kinky pile.

Midway between then & now were White Rock’s angelic nymph, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes’ calico-clad “sweetheart of the corn” and Baker Chocolate’s “La Belle Chocolatiere.” .Today’s climax is typified by Aircooled Motors Corp.’s (Franklin engines) current advertising illustration of a lithe and leggy air-cooled lovely clad in little or nothing and saying bithely into a phone: “Pick me up at eight . . . and we’ll fly to the club.”

*Early American Advertising Art, compiled by Advertising Consultant Carl Drepperd and issued for promotion purposes by the “Youth Group” magazines (American Girl, Boys’ Life, Open Road for Boys, etc)