What irony to realise that the colorful ads in this book pushed a product that eventually killed off the very magazines that the ads appeared in. Madison Avenue had no further use for the mass consumer titles of the day (Life, Look, Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post) once a television was in every living room.
The ninety-three ads in the book are a wonderful examples of how the set manufacturers pitched their new product to the public, there are eight ads using paintings to show folks dressed as suave sophisticates admiring their Zenith Black Magic sets or using personalities of the day, Rogers and Hammerstein for RCA, Martin and Lewis, Edgar Bergen or Bert Lancaster for Magnavox. RCA in 1958 ran a particularly creative ad in Colliers which involved holding a photo of the bottom half of a color TV screen on a black and white set, NBC then froze, for a minute, the program so viewers could marvel at what they saw, the top half in black and white, the bottom in color, imagine that happening today.
Bedsides the TV ads the author has included other related material, drink ads that show the sets as a focal point in social groups, especially for sporting events, several magazine covers featuring TV sets and nicely twelve super futuristic paintings by Charles Schridde that ran in consumer magazines in the early Sixties.
The book is well produced and all the ads are readable unlike another book of ads I bought recently, 'What's Your Poison: addictive advertising of the 40s -60s' (ISBN 1933112026) which is only 6.5 inches deep and text in the ads is certainly not readable. If you like consumer advertisements of the past have a look at 'All-American Ads 50s (ISBN 3822811580) a monster 926 page treasure trove of colorful selling from the Atomic Age.
This book largely compiles magazine advertisements for television sets spanning from 1946 until 1970, and it's fascinating to see how the medium and the device were sold to the American public. If you're a boomer (like I am), you'll enjoy it, and if you're interested in vintage advertising, you'll find it an essential addition to your library. It will variously make you laugh, scratch your head, and drop your mouth open in disbelief. My only criticism of the book (which prevented me from giving it a 5 star rating) is that the physical size of the boom is a bit small: the ads it contains originally appeared in large format magazines such as Life, Look and Saturday Evening Post, and their reproduction on the smaller sized pages of this book makes many of them difficult to read without a magnifying glass. I suppose that's the trade-off for a lower price. Highly recommended!
