The Candy with the Hole

The mid-century advertising campaign for Life Savers confectionery was a landmark in creative excellence. One of the defining characteristics was a superbly inventive use of white space, often in combination with minimal, serial imagery, presented with visual wit and grace. The two examples below illustrate the point. The image above neatly overturns all our expectations by depending for its impact on a large expanse of black. Originating in the late 1940s, it displays a relaxed attitude to racial stereotyping that would be unacceptable today. But, when first published it would have been seen as a witty backward glance to the lost age of the Minstrel Show and a reworking of the classic poster for Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer from 1927.


It was a great achievement to sustain such a high level of creativity in a campaign for an impulse purchase that cost no more than a nickel. Much of the credit must go to Harlow Rockwell (1910-88), Art Director with the New York ad agency, Young & Rubicam. Rockwell had the job of commissioning about ten full colour advertisements each year for the pages of mass circulation family magazines (Life, Look, Colliers, Saturday Evening Post, etc.). Photography was occasionally employed but for the most part these were highly desirable tasks for illustration specialists, especially children’s book illustrators. The look was always crisp, clean, fresh and spare in a way that made it truly stand out in an age dominated by text-heavy advertising. Rockwell later developed a second career as an illustrator of best selling non-fiction books for pre-school children in collaboration with his wife, Anne.


The racial complexities of blackface performing in the vaudeville era are explained with humour and relish in the pages of Nick Tosches’ book, Where Dead Voices Gather. It’s an amazingly detailed survey of a lost era in early American music that turns out to have very direct links with the music of the present. A highly recommended read. For lots more examples of Life Savers advertising, please visit the Visual Telling of Stories. Lastly, to brighten up our day, here comes one of 75, smartly turned out Life Savers girls employed to hand out 2000 free packs of Life Savers, each containing 3 sweets, on the streets of New York in the 1930s. To qualify for this work, a candidate had to be exactly 5’ 4” tall and measure 34-26-36 to fit into a one-size-fits-all uniform. They were required to launder the uniform each week and utter the magic words “Life Savers are always good taste” each time they hand out a sample.

Monkey Brand Santa

Our Simian Santa has struggled through a wintry landscape to bring Christmas cheer to users of Monkey Brand Soap. He is well and truly outside his comfort zone and the effort shows in his pained facial expression. The spindly, straggly Christmas tree clutched in his right hand would not look out of place at the New Forest Lapland. The bearing of mistletoe may be a misguided gesture; it’s not easy to imagine the refined beauties of Victorian womanhood braving the winter cold for a kiss from this Santa. The overall impression is decidedly melancholy but perhaps, not inappropriate for the first Christmas of the new era of Recession.

The World of Tomorrow

Timing is everything, and it was the misfortune of the planners of the New York World Fair that, while the focus of proceedings was fixed upon an exciting vision of future prosperity, across the Atlantic, Europe was descending ever more rapidly into a state of armed conflict. The wonders of technology on offer began to seem ever more frivolous and the captains of industry would soon be adapting these ideas for military use. America had surged out of the Depression years on a rising tide of consumerism and by 1939 a credible vision of the future in terms of how technology might impact on the next two decades had emerged. The World Fair of 1939 was designed to showcase these ideas and in this sense was a significant departure from the recent template for such events in which nations competed to make the brashest and boldest statements about national identity via the construction of absurdly bombastic pavilions stuffed with symbols of national pride.




The American twist on presenting the future to the public was to out-source most of the task to giant corporations, many of which, even at that time, had developed a truly global presence. Among them were Heinz, Ford, Kraft, General Motors, Firestone, Kodak, General Electric, and RCA, many of which had an economic power that exceeded all but the most developed nation states. On the whole the corporate branding on display had a cheap and cheerful look that made a refreshing change from the increasingly totalitarian style adopted by nation states. A highlight was the General Motors Building where Norman Bel Geddes gave a new word to the language with his exhibit, Futurama which exposed visitors to a dramatic visualisation of the world in 1960, unsurprisingly a world completely dominated by the ubiquity of motor vehicles.




This humble souvenir fold-out card renders the vision in an air-brushed palette of Looney Tunes chromatic intensity. There is a Machine Age aesthetic with an Art Deco inflection on display and Colonial Neo-Classicism seems to have a stronger presence than the severe geometry of Modernism. The strongest impression is that of a free and easy, advertising friendly, drug store/drive-in sensibility epitomised by the splendidly ridiculous Sealtest building with the appearance of a gigantic sectioned blender. Curving facades predominate and reach a climax in the seductive forms of the Electrical Products Building. With hindsight the whole endeavour seems outrageously optimistic. Presented on the eve of the Holocaust and the death and destruction of World War II. Predicated on a future of unlimited resources, courtesy of a planet with an assumed infinite capacity for absorbing environmental damage. But, therein lies the charm, not to mention the inspiration for Bruce McCall’s parodies in the pages of Zany Afternoons.

Postcard of the day No. 19, Narbonne

One of the pleasures of examining vintage postcards is the rich harvest of detail to be observed. Some single cards contain enough imagery for ten. This example is not quite that rich but there is a generous range of narrative possibilities on display. Starting at the top we have an enigmatic couple leaning out of a top floor open window watching the events below. At street level is a motley collection of urchins presided over by an older youth proudly mounted on a bicycle. The little girls have their backs to the camera but the boys’ expressions range from sullen defiance to insolent grins. On the far right a small boy stands in isolation, his left hand grips something made of paper or fabric. He wears a cap and an indecipherable expression. The image as a whole belongs to the genre in which indistinct traces of lives that have been lived and lost, linger on into the future, separated from every thread of documentary evidence relating to their identities. In the fashion of the time, the decrepit wall of the building has been covered with advertising, mostly for alcoholic drink. The most intriguing poster is for Le Petit Journal and features an image of a man clinging by his fingertips to the edge of a precipice while a female companion looks on, arms folded in apparent indifference. My guess is that it promotes a popular melodrama published in serial form in the pages of the newspaper. The advertising graphic styles suggest a date in the first decade of the last century.



The caption explains the reason for celebrating this once substantial building now fallen into disrepair. The Maison des Trois-Nourrices translates as the House of the Three Wet-Nurses. The second line informs us that this is where Le Marquis de Cinq-Mars and his friend and co-conspirator, François de Thou concealed themselves from arrest by the agents of Louis XIII and Richelieu. Their flight was in vain; they were eventually executed on September 12th, 1642. The story persisted in the popular imagination thanks to a novel by Alfred de Vigny, published in 1826 and a Gounod operatic adaptation, first performed in 1877.

Egyptian House, Penzance

Penzance is one of a select group of towns that attract the designation of the “last of England”. Despite its remoteness, it’s well worth a visit to sample the individual flavour and character of a town that has resisted/escaped absorption into the general mediocrity of the modern English townscape. Not everything is wonderful. The entrails of contemporary commerce are much in evidence, including one quite horrific strip on the main shopping street (Market Jew Street) where 4 out of 5 consecutive premises are occupied by mobile phone retailers!

The Egyptian House in Chapel Street is one of the town’s architectural treasures. Built in 1835 when the cult for all things Egyptian was probably on the wane elsewhere, it drew heavily on the design of the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly (designed by P F Robinson in 1812) for inspiration. Local mineralogist, John Lavin, commissioned the building to serve as a museum and repository for his collection of geological specimens. It’s a fine example of attention-seeking architecture with its colourful and exotic facade. Much of the detailing is the product of the architect’s imagination and there was no intention to produce a historically accurate recreation of genuine Egyptian building style but in its cheerfully impure form it does a wonderful job of brightening up the townscape.

For the last 40 years the building has belonged to the Landmark Trust and the external condition appears very well maintained. When the fashion for things Egyptian passed the building must have looked increasingly dated and the critical eyes of the Victorian Gothic Revivalists would have found it an anathema. All the more remarkable that it has survived to the present to delight us with its lavish ornamentation and superb lotus bud columns flanking the entrance.

Boris Artzybasheff

Artzybasheff’s exotic and bizarre illustrations made frequent appearances in the mid-century pages of Life and Fortune and on the cover of Time. Airbrushed forms, masses of accumulated detail and bio-mechanical fantasy figures populate his images. He made a speciality of illustrating the unpleasant and unpalatable. Machines of warfare and the global spread of tropical diseases were typical subjects. Quality control was not always in evidence and some fairly feeble stuff found its way into print but at his best the scale and bravura of his magnificent cast of malevolent characters was irresistible. The visual vocabulary of medieval demonology was cheerfully combined with the Astounding Science Fiction genre.


Boris had a liking for vast, sprawling cosmologies but even by his standards this Hindu Pantheon was a tour de force. Life magazine published it as a three page gatefold in the issue dated March 7, 1955. It was a spectacular image that enabled Boris to deploy his full repertory of grotesqueries but the mood is lighter and more playful than usual despite the decapitations and disembowellings. This was a subject that surpassed even Boris’s wildest imaginings and the finished article has more than a hint of Bollywood about it. This could well have been Boris’s finest hour. For more examples of the strange workings of the Boris imagination, a visit to Chris Mullen’s Alphabet of Illustrators is essential.

Postcard of the day No. 18

Today’s postcard is a watery image of the riverside entrance to the Gare d’Austerlitz as seen in the great Paris flood of 1910. Below is a photograph of the same view taken in August 2008. A curiosity of the Gare d’Austerlitz is the Métro platforms constructed high in the station roof. This is the place where Métro line 5 emerges from the rafters of the station roof on to a bridge (centre right in these images) before crossing the Seine on the Viaduc d’Austerlitz. The Gare d’Austerlitz is a more modest structure than Gare du Nord or Gare de l’Est with their imposing facades and it lacks the association with the Impressionist painters that distinguishes Gare St-Lazare. In recent years the range of destinations has contracted and compares unfavourably with the glamorous southbound routes out of Gare de Lyon but it remains the place to go for the overnight Trenhotel service to Barcelona and Madrid. In the future all this will change when current work to double the size of the station by 2020 is complete. Current plans are for the TGV services Sud-Est and Atlantique to be transferred to the new enlarged station.