Mid-Century Ads
Mad Men has left our screens for another year – for the rest of 2012 you’ll have to get your tailoring, interior design and receding hairline porn elsewhere. As for the actual advertising, fear not: as a nice change from squinting to make out what artwork Peggy has pinned to her wall, you can just open up Taschen’s rather wonderful Mid-Century Ads: Advertising from the Mad Men Era.
This hefty double volume contains an away of print advertising from the 50s and 60s, with an introduction by the ever-knowledgable Steven Heller. It’s the sort of thing you’ll be dragging off your shelf time and again for reference. So much of it is alien to design now – colours just looked different back then for some reason, and there’s so much copy! – that a flick through every now and then is useful for giving you a different perspective on a project.
It’s a shame that Taschen have only gone after the Mad Men pound, as volumes dedicated to advertising from earlier and later decades would be equally fascinating (you could fill the 80s volume with nothing but cigarette adverts and it’s be incredible), but that’s a minor quibble. Get this on your shelf.
3rd Jul 2012
3:04 pm
Agreed Daniel, well worth getting your hands on a copy. Its a real coffee-table sized tome, choc full of visuals with not too many words getting in the way.
4th Jul 2012
9:55 am
Pesky words.