February 5, 2009
Windows in time: Advertisements of the old West on display in new digital collection
Beer as a healthful family tonic? Cigarettes you can “smoke all day” long with no ill effects? Asbestos that does triple duty as a furniture polish, insect repellant and carpet cleaner?
Welcome to the world of Northwest print advertising, turn of the century style — the last century, that is — in a new digital image collection by the UW Libraries Special Collections Division called Early Advertising of the West, 1867-1918.
The collection was created by Kris Kinsey, digital projects coordinator for Special Collections, with help from James Hancock, an Information School graduate student who has since earned his master’s degree and now works at the Pierce County Library.
A longtime staff member in Special Collections, Kinsey said she’d been intrigued by such images over the years and thought it would be fun to start gathering them for a collection.
She and Hancock combed through area periodicals, directories and even theater programs for about a year looking for iconic advertisements. The two carefully copied the ads using a flatbed scanner or a digital camera and worked in PhotoShop to achieve the best resolution possible.
“Before we knew it we had 450 images,” she said, each a sort of window to its time. “You come across these fascinating advertisements and you think, there’s a lot of information in that advertisement … about cultural norms and what someone living in the 1890s might have been exposed to,” she said.
Created by late-19th century Mad Men, you might say, the ads grab the reader’s attention with lively graphics and sensationalized copy.
One 1904 real estate ad grabs the eye with “DO YOU? …” and then seeks to plumb the reader’s fantasies of a better life: “Do you want to fish? Do you want to hunt? Do you want to bathe in the salt water? … Do you want to improve your health? Do you want to drink in the fresh breezes from the Straits of Fuca?” Several questions later (“Do you want a chicken ranch?”) the ad states its purpose: “Then go to Richmond Beach, Puget Sound’s Favorite Spot. The property is dirt cheap.”
Others sing the medicinal praises of alcohol, such as one that indicates Northwest brand Rainier beer is “recommended by your physician” and another that boasts the brew is “beneficial to young and old … it brings the glow of health and a new lease on life. No medicine can equal it as a tonic.”
Kinsey was entertained by the medicine show-style sensationalism of some of the ads. “All the health remedies and the quackeries … and phrenology and all the different pseudo-psychological, spiritual and advisers you could go to! They are heavy in the 1890s and then around the turn of the century they start to go away.”
Hancock said though Kinsey chose most of the photos, he had certain favorites, too. One was an ad for “Miss Winslow’s Soothing Syrup” that promised, “In almost every instance, where the infant is suffering from pain and exhaustion, relief will be found in fifteen or twenty minutes.”
Hancock said, “I did some research on it and it turned out it contained morphine. That’s why it was calming babies. Eventually the product was condemned, but for years it was sold as a reputable product.”
Other ads provide true historical information, Kinsey said. “By looking through Seattle directories sometimes you can come across images of buildings that we don’t have photographic representations of, or that we don’t hold in our collections, and I think that’s fascinating.”
The Alaskan Gold Rush of 1897 and thereafter figures into several of the ads, with one offering a berth to Alaska on the “commodious and fast sailing steamer” The Portland for $700. “That was a huge amount of money in those days,” Kinsey said. “You were basically betting the family fortune.”
The ads seem to at once show how times have changed, and also how some things never seem to change.
“In a way I think we stay the same because we’re still promoting miracle drugs, they’ve just been tested by the FDA,” said Hancock, whose undergraduate degree was in advertising. “We see wonderful butterflies telling us to sleep — it’s sort of a new message of promoting miracle drugs. For some reason it’s easier for us to swallow.”
The collection was made public in December, and Kinsey said outside researchers have already shown some interest. “In fact we just got a request for some of these images from a researcher who’s publishing a history of Pioneer Square and looking for unique representations of the turn of the century.”
She said more new digital collections are already being prepared. One is on children’s literature, “which deals with all the different imagery children were exposed to in the late 19th century,” and another, even grander project involves digitizing “our beautiful world maps from the 16th to the 19th century.”
She hopes such digital collections inspire people to make greater use of Special Collections’ rich resources. “We’re open to everyone,” she said, “and we have a wealth of the most fascinating things…”
Click here to view the Early Advertising of the West collection online.
