This Week: EphemeraNow.com

Advertising images from the mid-'50s have become a touchstone for an idealized American lifestyle. Through Norman Rockwell-esque illustrations and shimmeringly perfect photos, they depicted an alternate reality in which consumerism creates perfect happiness. While that is still the ultimate message of Madison Avenue today, ad firms of yesteryear did so without irony or cynicism. Perhaps that is why these images are so popular today–they evoke a mythical era of contentment with artful enthusiasm and an underlying optimism about the American Way. Collected in books, recycled in campy ads, these images go beyond nostalgia to something more personal about the way we view our country. David Hall, a 43-year-old newspaper editor in Washington D.C., is a lifelong collector of such ads and has posted many of the finest ones at EphemeraNow.com. What makes his site so singular is the fact that his scans are superb. The image quality is so good, in fact, that he sells scans to support the site. Beyond his fine abilities with Photoshop, Hall also knows a lot about the ads themselves.

How did you first get interested in vintage ad graphics?

When I was a kid I found a 1956 issue of Life magazine at my grandmother's house. It was like the Rosetta Stone–it had the answer to something, but I wasn't sure what the question was. I was mesmerized by it–the smell of the pages, the tailfins on the cars, the people in the funny clothes. Then when I was around 12 years old I came across some old National Geographics from the 1950s. The articles ("Colorado by Car and Campfire") didn't do much for me, but the ads were fantastic. Especially the car ads–I'd never seen anything like them, and I'd been a car nut since I was 3. My parents humored me and soon I had a collection of National Geographics going back to 1915. I'd read them for hours at a time, and I'm sure Mom and Dad thought I was studying up on Antarctica or looking at naked women from Bali, but really I was learning the difference between the 1957 and 1958 Frigidaire ad campaigns. (1957 was, of course, the year of "The Sheer Look" in kitchen appliances.) And the back page on every other issue was a Coca-Cola ad illustrated by Haddon Sundblom.

What kinds of ads most appeal to you?

Ones with painted illustrations, good color and interesting typography. Fonts back then were a lot of trouble to make–after a typeface was designed on paper it had to be carved by hand at some point to make the master dies, and doing that was an art. Then around 1959, phototypesetting came into use and typography started going down the toilet, and photos were replacing painted illustrations. By around 1965 everything began to look "modern"–bland, standardized, not much different from the way printed advertising looks today.

Why do you like these old ads?

Nostalgia, I guess. Freud says we're all trying to crawl back into the womb. I'm guess I'm getting there via Madison Avenue.

Are you familiar with the individual artists or designers behind the ads?

When it comes to cars, the two giants in the field were Arthur Fitzpatrick and Van Kaufman, who worked as a team. Their two main accounts were Buick from 1954 to 1956 and Pontiac from 1959 to the 1970s. The Pontiac work was signed VK/AF. They made context as much a part of the ad as the car–they'd do backgrounds from the French Riviera, New York Street scenes, and it was technically and esthetically very good. Up till then there was not much of an attempt at verisimilitude, and you had either a blank white background with a few people standing around or it was all kind of cartoony and stylized. Chrysler had two excellent artists in the 1950s–Arthur Radebaugh and Larry Baranovic, whose work was mostly in sales brochures.

The good non-automotive ad illustrators usually had careers as magazine illustrators, too, either doing covers or illustrating fiction–for Collier's, the Saturday Evening Post. Stevan Dohanos, Constantin Alajalov, John Falter, Ben Prins, Leslie Ragan, Edwin Georgi, Philip Dormont and Howard Terpning are a few names that come to mind.

How do you think the ads of the past are "different"
from present-day advertising?

For one thing, they were bigger. A page from Life or Collier's is about one and a half times as big as the average mass-circulation magazine today. So there was a greater visual impact. And of course the illustrations for a lot of them were painted, not photographed. You're looking at art instead of a photograph. (And I know photography is art, but Ansel Adams didn't do the visuals for, say, the Edsel campaign.) There's a huge difference, and you can experience that difference just by looking at the art, which is what the website is all about. And the psychology of selling was different. People weren't jaded like they are now, and the social and technological changes from year to year were much bigger than they are today–they had the atom bomb, television, space travel, and the move from cities to the suburbs to deal with, and marketing kept pace. Everything was advertised as being "new" or "modern"–the car of the future today, the truly modern house for today's changing families–and a lot of the time that was pretty much true.

Where do you actually get these ads?
Do you have a massive magazine collection?

I do have a massive magazine collection–Fortune, Life, Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic, but the majority of the scans on the site are from automotive sales brochures (another massive collection) or press releases.

Describe your typical search for new images/magazines.
Where do you find them? How much do they cost?

For general advertising the best source is old Saturday Evening Posts. Even after 40 or 50 years, the paper is still white. Life magazine used cheaper stock, and by now most of it has turned yellow and is kind of brittle. At your local antique mall old SEP's usually go for five to seven dollars. They're on eBay too, but usually just one or two per auction. I like to buy in bulk. There's an antique mall somewhere along I-75 that I frequent. Most of the Saturday Evening Posts I have came from Gas City, Indiana–they still have the address stickers. And they're mostly from one person. (Thank you, Marion C. Topliff, wherever you are.) The car brochures are almost all from eBay. Usually in the $20-$40 range. The most I ever paid was around $400, for the jumbo-size 1959 Cadillac brochure. It's all kept under lock and key at an undisclosed location.

Anyway, once I begin flipping through this stuff, I rely on the "wow factor" when choosing images. If I turn the page and say WOW, I'll mark the place with a little Post-It Note.

What are the most popular images with visitors/buyers?

Cars, definitely.

Why do you think there's a growing desire to collect old advertisements?
What do they mean to people?

Nostalgia? The aching, lonely emptiness at the center of human existence? Too much disposable income? I'm not sure, but eBay probably has something to do with it.

How are these ads defined as "public domain"?

Most advertising and sales literature back then was never copyrighted to begin with, so it's PD. For what little that was, for works created before 1962 the copyrights expired after 28 years unless they were renewed. Of course we don't own rights to the original images–anyone with a scanner and a stack of old Packard brochures is free to merchandise scans of same–but we do own the scans we make. It's not like you're just plopping something down on a Xerox machine and pushing a button. It requires expensive equipment and software, as well as a certain amount of specialized knowledge. Basically we're a service bureau–we'll get a graphic ready to use as a four-color separation, and it won't look like a reproduced halftone. No moiré, and we clean up a lot of other garbage, too. Even the low-res images on the Web site usually take a couple of hours to do, and a lot more if it's made from two facing-page images that have to be stitched together.

I usually sell just two or three scans a year–enough to pay for Web hosting. It's all for fun, and the enjoyment of the Web-viewing public. The whole vast operation is run from the guest bedroom of my house.

How did you get the idea for the website?

I stole it from Chris Whalen. He's a management consultant who lives in a Manhattan penthouse and owns something like 25 cars, all from 1958. He had an Earthlink homepage with scans from old Edsel and Mercury brochures, and they were works of art. He's Michelangelo, with Photoshop instead of a brush. Anyway in 1996 I stumbled on his Web site and his eyepoppingly beautiful scans and began an e-mail correspondence with him, and I learned the art of scanning virtually at his knee. Or I guess that should be at his virtual knee. And in a way it really is an artistic transformation, when you take an image viewed by reflected light and transform it into one that emits light. You end up with something completely different, and for whatever reason I think the results have tremendous eye appeal. I mean, the average computer monitor is capable of displaying a really fantastic picture–better that HDTV, even–but the Web really hasn't taken advantage of that. Most of the images you see are just 150 or 300 pixels wide. Of course a lot of this is for manageable download times for people with dialup connections, but luckily fewer and fewer people have that constraint as broadband spreads.

How do you get your scans to look so darn good?

The secret is a pinch of oregano. Actually it's a lot of things. You have to know Photoshop inside and out, and know how to work the scanner. And scan at high enough resolution, which can take a long time. Old ads are tricky because the pictures are made up of zillions of little dots, and you have to manipulate things so you don't end up with moiré–something that looks like you're looking through a screen door. Sometimes math is involved. (Also a large rectangle of black construction paper, a big square of foam padding and a 10-pound freeweight.) And good equipment helps. I use an industrial-strength A3-format scanner that'll take anything up to 11 by 17 inches. It's a Umax Mirage II and weighs about 75 pounds and requires its own piece of furniture.

Have you considered expanding the EphemeraNow site beyond just ads?

Not really. You gotta stop somewhere!

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