20s All-American Ads [Anglais] [Broché]

Taschen's legendary decade-by-decade chronicle of American advertising hits a high point in the book on the 1920s. Its hundreds of coruscatingly colorful Jazz Age advertisements, superbly reproduced on practically bulletproof paper, add up to an irresistible question: why stay this side of paradise when the new consumer culture can send you to heaven right now? Just look up: apple-cheeked cherubs bear steaming flapjacks to a beaming sleeper; fluffy, angel-like Michelin tire men ply the skies; the Certainteed building-supplies giant (a sort of Australopithecus Jolly Green Giant) throws his head back against billowing cumulonimbus clouds. Cecil B. de Mille’s poster for his 1933 tsunami-disaster film The Deluge can't match the grandiosity of some of these ads for the humblest household products.

After a short but sweet introductory essay by New York Times designer Steven Heller, editor Jim Heimann organizes the ads by subject: consumer products, fashion and beauty, entertainment, travel, etc. It's gripping to watch sex and status try to outdo each other in selling 1920s cars: the snooty Pierce Arrow associates itself with wealthy Century Club types, while the Ford Fordor stresses the populist $660 price and the flapper struggling to keep the wind from whipping her perilously brief hem over her head. High art rears its lovely head in ads for the Marmon Big 8 racer, powered by a 125-horsepower engine and a lightninglike look derived from Futurist art. Most ads range in a safer esthetic region bounded by retro-Currier & Ives, zesty art deco, and the funny papers. Fear is a great motivator: hunky Marvin loses the girls to halitosis; classy dames subtly judge each other on the quality of the ScotTissue in the bathroom: "Women sense it immediately!" The ads featuring black people fascinatingly demonstrate that even the era's most talented artists couldn't draw blacks because they literally could not see them when they looked at them. This book is a must for any serious student of pop culture—or anybody out for a graphic good time. --Tim Appelo

The dawn of American consumerism

Prohibition made liquor illegal and all the more fun to drink. Speakeasies, luxury cars, women’s liberation, bathtub gin and a booming economy kept the country’s mood on the up-and-up. Women sheared off their locks and taped their chests, donning flapper dresses and dancing the Charleston until their legs gave out. Gangsters flourished in big cities and gangster movies flourished in Hollywood. It was the roaring twenties in America: a singular time in history, a lull between two world wars and the last gas before the nation’s descent into the Great Depression. Forging the way into the future like a modern streamliner in a sea of antiquity, advertising in the 20s sought to bring avant-garde into the mainstream—which it did with great success.

The author:
Steven Heller is the art director of The New York Times Book Review and co-chair of MFA Design at the School of Visual Arts. He has edited or authored over eighty books on design and popular culture including Merz to Emigre and Beyond: Avant Garde Magazine Design of the 20th Century and Design Literacy Revised.

The editor:
Jim Heimann is a resident of Los Angeles, a graphic designer, writer, historian, and instructor at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. He is the author of numerous books on architecture, popular culture, and Hollywood history, and serves as a consultant to the entertainment industry.