Taschen’s legendary decade-by-decade chronicle of American advertising hits a high point in the book on the 1920s. Its hundreds of coruscatingly colorful Jazz Age advertisements, superbly reproduced on practically bulletproof paper, add up to an irresistible question: why stay this side of paradise when the new consumer culture can send you to heaven right now? Just look up: apple-cheeked cherubs bear steaming flapjacks to a beaming sleeper; fluffy, angel-like Michelin tire men ply the skies; the Certainteed building-supplies giant (a sort of Australopithecus Jolly Green Giant) throws his head back against billowing cumulonimbus clouds. Cecil B. de Mille’s poster for his 1933 tsunami-disaster film The Deluge can’t match the grandiosity of some of these ads for the humblest household products.
After a short but sweet introductory essay by New York Times designer Steven Heller, editor Jim Heimann organizes the ads by subject: consumer products, fashion and beauty, entertainment, travel, etc. It’s gripping to watch sex and status try to outdo each other in selling 1920s cars: the snooty Pierce Arrow associates itself with wealthy Century Club types, while the Ford Fordor stresses the populist $660 price and the flapper struggling to keep the wind from whipping her perilously brief hem over her head. High art rears its lovely head in ads for the Marmon Big 8 racer, powered by a 125-horsepower engine and a lightninglike look derived from Futurist art. Most ads range in a safer esthetic region bounded by retro-Currier & Ives, zesty art deco, and the funny papers. Fear is a great motivator: hunky Marvin loses the girls to halitosis; classy dames subtly judge each other on the quality of the ScotTissue in the bathroom: “Women sense it immediately!” The ads featuring black people fascinatingly demonstrate that even the era’s most talented artists couldn’t draw blacks because they literally could not see them when they looked at them. This book is a must for any serious student of pop culture—or anybody out for a graphic good time. –Tim Appelo
Customer Reviews
All American Ads - 20s:
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.
Back to the past:
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.
Best of series, typographically speaking…:
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).
Good Reference Material:
As an illustrator I have found this book to be a valuable resource for color combinations, patterning and clothing styles.
I just couldn’t resist this one…:
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.
