Thursday, April 14, 2011

Smoke This Book


The New York Times discusses advertisements that were in books.

From the article...

If the mark of a classic is that every time you read it you discover something new, then the 1972 paperback of A. E. Van Vogt’s science-fiction novel “Quest for the Future” just might be a classic. Those who read the book when it was first published in hardcover in 1970 certainly won’t recognize this passage from Chapter 15: “A large gleaming machine with an opening at one end was wheeled in, and once again the cycle ran its Micronite Filter. Mild, Smooth Taste. For All the Right Reasons. Kent. America’s Quality Cigarette. King Size or Deluxe 100s.”

A full-color advertising insert, bound directly into the book, brings “Quest for the Future” crashing into the mundane present. And this whiplash effect isn’t unique to Van Vogt’s book. A familiar if puzzling sight to flea market devotees, ad-stuffed paperbacks from the 1960s and ’70s now have a paper trail hidden among more than 40 million pages of internal tobacco industry documents archived online in the University of California, San Francisco’s Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (legacy.library.ucsf.edu). Read the memorandums and you’ll want a shower afterward — or perhaps a cigarette.

No comments: