Saturday Evening Post Ads, 1968

Few of us were alive and/or cognizant during the glory era of The Saturday Evening Post, the bedrock of the American magazine publishing establishment from, say, 1903 (when the mag famously introduced readers to Jack London's The Call of the Wild in serialized form) until 1969 (when a defamation lawsuit shuttered the publication, if temporarily). While the Post re-emerged in 1971 and has continued to exist in various forms since, it's more homage to its former grandiosity than it is vanguard of the magazine institution.

That said, the Post's innate aura of nostalgia (Norman Rockwell aside, please) draws one to its yellowing pages even today, and one can't help but breathe musty fumes of historical embers from one page to the next in, for example, the April 20, 1968 issue which I happened upon recently.

Most remarkable for a condensation of the grandiloquent Canadian-born economist and statesman John Kenneth Galbraith's novel The Triumph and a cover story on how America's police were honing their crowd-busting skills in the midst of the race riots of the Civil Rights era, one also finds comfort in the now-quaint historicity of its ads. To wit:

Ah, the Record-Club trap. Sure, you can get Sinatra for 99 cents. Then Dean Martin will cost you more.

This image tugs on more heart strings than you knew you had.

What happened to the guy who thought it was a good idea to print "Pay More" in size-144 font?

A 1968 ad that refers to 1907 as the good old days. Ah, the good old days.

These fictional barkeeping ballplayers are now a huge draw on eBay.

Click here to view the full album of 29 bourbon-shilling, muscle-car-bragging, cigarette-filter-innovation-boasting ads from the April 20, 1968 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.

{Related post: Life Magazine Ads: Year in Pictures 1988}

Newsweek's Mad Men issue dons 60s homage ads

Ahead of this weekend's long-awaited restart of the hit AMC television series Mad Men, America's perennially ho-hum, middle-class mouthpiece Newsweek is hooking newsstand readers with a Draperesque issue featuring retro advertising creative inspired by the fictional firm SCDP and the show's maddeningly addictive 1960s-era pop style.

This hopefully one-time-only (please don't spark a fad) collection of blissed-out, gender-normative magazine ads puts the fun in advertising fundamentalism; they're worth a look and a re-look, perhaps alongside a reading of the wonderful Harper's essay "The False Nostalgia of Mad Men" by Jenny Diski from the January Jones issue.

From the psychedelic "The Spam Who Shagged Me" page to the erect Johnston & Murphy ad and the all-the-right-props Uprising piece, these homages are as priceless as Peggy's glass-ceiling tantrums, as tasteless as a Patio commercial, and almost as historically accurate Cooper's infamous "slippery slope" line.

Great move by the magazine: It's Don Draper's rye-soaked train wreck, and we can't look away.

You can view all the ads here and vote for your favourite. 

(Tip 'o the hat to the Magazines Canada blog.)

Life Magazine Ads: Year in Pictures 1988

Chanced upon a copy of Life magazine's "Year in Pictures 1988" (published January 1989). Aside from all the coverage of some guy named Dukakis were these spectacular advertisements from the days of yore:

See the full gallery of thirty ads from Life's "Year in Pictures 1988"