Advertising used to be a lot more refined—even as it was selling snake oil—as can be seen from this final dip into the January 1898 issue of The Nickell.

Captured in an elegant drawing reminiscent of Charles Dana Gibson, two upper-class diners ever-so-delicately discuss the lady’s indigestion, which it seems can only be solved by swallowing a Ripans Tabule and waiting 10 minutes.

But what’s Ripans? And what the heck is a Tabule? (more…)

How much did we love bicycles in 1898?

So much so that the January 1898 issue of The Nickell was packed with ads for bikes and biking accessories, such as the Columbia Chainless Bicycle (“totally unaffected by mud, dust, rain, or sleet”), the “Serrate Tread” Tire (if your dealer doesn’t have the new ’98 model, “tell him he’s not up to date), and The Wheelmen’s Gazette (“an illustrated monthly magazine devoted to the grandest, healthiest, most manly sport in the world—cycling”).

But what really proved to me that bicycling wasn’t just a hobby in those days, but a craze, was the poem “Ye Ballad of Ye Mermaiden,” in which a mermaid was spellbound … by a cyclist.

Or the wheelman’s “wondrous shell on which you travel so fast and well,” anyway.

I assume “she scorches beneath the sea” in the poem’s final line merely meant she was going very fast. But if you’ve got a better handle on the slang of the late 19th century, let me know!

So as I continued flipping through the January 1989 issue of The Nickell, a tiny ad, no more than 1/16 of a page in size, caught my eye. It was mixed in with other similarly small ads for things such as skate sharpeners and cancer cures, only this one, instead of being quaint, was puzzling.

It offered to sell readers a “bold, brave book” about the “ethics of marriage,” but as I looked more closely, I wondered whether the fine print was a coded message for information about contraception.

After all, what else could have been meant by the term “controlled maternity”? (more…)

I was flipping through the January 1898 issue of The Nickell—which, as you know, is the kind of thing I love to do, because it’s the closest to a time machine I’m going to get—

—when I spotted a poignant advertisement filled with nostalgia not just for the late 19th century—but for the early 19th century as well. (more…)

Earlier this month, I shared with you a bunch of typewriters you could have bought in 1893. So let’s say you had bought one of them … what then?

Well, if you were a writer, surely you didn’t expect to publish your stories without a little editorial supervision. That’s where Dr. Titus M. Coan’s New York Bureau of Revision came in. His advertisement in the January 1893 issue of The Cosmopolitan promised that he’d provide “unbiased criticism of prose and verse.”

Would love to know exactly which “leading authors” endorsed his services, though.

And at the other end of the publishing food chain, readers need help, too. That’s what the Holloway Reading Stand and Dictionary Holder were all about.

Because reading a book while letting it rest in one’s lap is so old-fashioned!

Old friends visited us from New York over the long weekend, and there was much baking and grilling and blowing stuff up real good, all activities that are mandatory when celebrating the 4th of July.

Last night, we somehow got around to discussing the evolution of the QWERTY keyboard, and then we moved on to praising the IBM Selectric typewriter, much beloved by those of us lucky enough to have owned one during the pre-computer past. Which made me remember that one of the old magazines I own (and in case you don’t happen to know, I love reading newspapers and magazines that are a century or more old) contains multiple ads for typewriters, which were then not so many decades old, at least commercially.

So here is what you could have ordered from the back pages of the January 1893 issue of The Cosmopolitan … if you were able to make up your mind when faced with the wildly varying styles. (more…)

According to a full-page map of the globe (well, half of it, anyway) in the December 19, 1914 issue of The Graphic, “a series of operations … have swept half the world clear of Germans,” “peace in the Pacific has been attained,” and “the commerce of all nations can proceed with safety throughout the vast expanses from the coasts of Mozambique to those of South America.”

Whew! Sure glad Vice-Admiral Sturdee took care of that!

Check out the battle details below.

Aren’t you glad Germany never gave the world any further trouble?

A few years ago, Irene and I visited Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, and while it was an amazing experience, I don’t remember our meals being anything like the spread shown in this image from the Christmas 1914 issue of The Graphic.

There’s no indication of exactly which “unimportant tomb” was being invaded for lunch.

Considering the dramatic surroundings, I don’t think I’d have had much of an appetite anyway. I’d have been much too awestruck to eat.

Guess these tourists had no sense of wonder.

I shared a 1917 infographic about aviation with you last week that shows how far we’ve come in nearly a century, and now I’ll share an advertisement from an earlier edition of the same newspaper that reflects the passage of time in an entirely different way—for it’s filled with the names of famous people whose patronage is supposed to make us desire a product—and 98 years after their fame, I have no idea who any of these people were!

Time doesn’t always erase the famous. After all, last year I showed you an 1898 ad for Vin Mariani in which the product was touted by the likes of Jules Verne, Emile Zola, and Alexandre Dumas. But as for these famous men and women, who thought that “Peps possess a real germ-killing quality” in the November 7, 1914 issue of The Graphic, I don’t recognize a single name.

Do you? Take a look at the ad below, and then tell me whether—without doing online searches—the names carry any meaning for you.

Give up? I did.

But here’s what I learned from my own Googling. (more…)

Yesterday, as we were moving vast quantities of assorted cheeses from our non-refrigerating refrigerator into ice-filled coolers—we had no power due to the thunderstorm; perhaps you were in the same situation—I remembered an article written more than a century ago in which someone from the U.S. was gobsmacked that the French had more than one kind of cheese. I wanted to reread the piece … but that was easier said than done.

I love reading magazines from the late 1800s and early 1900s to see how things really were back in the day, and whenever I visit a used bookstore, the first thing I check out is whether any bound volumes are for sale. I couldn’t recall which of many old magazines I owned had printed the piece; all I remembered was that it was in a magazine that printed its stories in two columns per page, rather than just one—which left out all those volumes of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly. I started with an 1852 volume of The National (nope, not there), then dove into The Cosmopolitan from 1902 (not there, either), before finding what I was looking for in the October 1878 Harper’s.

In Marie Stevens Howland’s article “Butter Stores in Paris” (strange how I only remembered the cheese, but not the butter), she was amazed that in France, not only did shoppers get to choose more than one kind of cheese, they didn’t have to live in fear that it would be terrible. She wrote:

One thing sure to surprise the American in Paris is the almost endless variety of the cheese. Here, our only idea of that article is generally the huge ‘factory cheese’ of the groceries. It has no special name, cheese to the average citizen meaning this only. He has to taste it before daring to buy it, for the name conveys little notion of its flavor or quality, and it may be mild or strong, rich or poor, though the price is the same. In Paris, no one dreams of tasting cheese when buying it.

More than one kind of cheese? Astonishing! (more…)