About And Now A Word

Old ads are great, and I don't think enough people stop to look at them.

That's basically the whole idea here. And Now A Word collects vintage advertising: the cereal boxes, the impossible colors of a 1920s travel poster, the face creams promising miracles, the patent medicines promising more, and gives them a second look. These things were made to sell you something and then get thrown away, and most of them were. The ones that survived turn out to be little time capsules - what people ate, wanted, feared, and got talked into, all dressed up in the best art you could buy.

There are five corners to poke around in. Food is the big one - the brands that built the modern kitchen. Beauty is a hundred years of selling you a new face. Travel is back when a poster could sell you a train ticket and a whole imagined life to go with it. Automobiles is fins, chrome, and the future as drawn by people selling cars. And Oddities is the junk drawer - gadgets, cure-alls, and the stuff too strange to file anywhere else.

Most of what's here is public domain, the old copyright-free record of commercial art. When something newer shows up, it's because there's actually something worth saying about it. The point was never to dump a pile of old ads. It's to look closer, and say a word about what they show us.

And now, a word.