Vintage Ad Browser. A big thanks to Tara Calishain for putting me onto this one. Vintage Ad Browser was created in 2009/2010 and released in 2010, by
Philipp Lenssen from Germany, currently living in China. This site aims
to collect vintage ads from a variety of sources, including comic
books, CD-Roms, websites, APIs, your submissions, book, magazine &
comic book scans, and more. At the moment, this site contains 123,311 adverts.
Some of these go back a very long way - an early tobacco ad was in the 1800s for example. There are over 50 categories, from Airlines to Xmas, arranged in date order. This is a really addictive place to spend time - I found some of the early Computer related adverts quite amazing. Others however were quite shocking, playing on outdated racial stereotypes for example. (The first page of Tobacco adverts will illustrate this quite clearly.)
Unfortunately the scans are not as clear as I'd like - for those adverts with a lot of dense text it was impossible to read them with any ease at all. Some of them are available for purchase, others just for looking at really. There's no search options either, just category/date, but with over 100,000 adverts available I'm not about to offer to produce meta data for it!
This is a superb resource for searching for historical data, social attitudes, company information and so on (with the caveat previously mentioned) and you can spend hours there!
Some of these go back a very long way - an early tobacco ad was in the 1800s for example. There are over 50 categories, from Airlines to Xmas, arranged in date order. This is a really addictive place to spend time - I found some of the early Computer related adverts quite amazing. Others however were quite shocking, playing on outdated racial stereotypes for example. (The first page of Tobacco adverts will illustrate this quite clearly.)
Unfortunately the scans are not as clear as I'd like - for those adverts with a lot of dense text it was impossible to read them with any ease at all. Some of them are available for purchase, others just for looking at really. There's no search options either, just category/date, but with over 100,000 adverts available I'm not about to offer to produce meta data for it!
This is a superb resource for searching for historical data, social attitudes, company information and so on (with the caveat previously mentioned) and you can spend hours there!
Phil, glad you got something out of the site! And did you know that there's a search option on the homepage? You can search for certain keywords, e.g. enter "camel" or so...
Posted by: Philipp Lenssen | January 19, 2010 at 05:29 AM