Treasures and Musings @ Modern Graphic History Library

Honoring Mom This Mother's Day

This Sunday is Mother's Day.  It's the day to honor your mother for all she's done for you.

When she cared for you as an infant...

 
   John Gannam's Balanced Pacific Sheets advertisement, Saturday Evening Post, Feb. 19. 1919.

 

And stayed with you when you couldn't sleep...

   

Al Parker illustration from Jane's Blanket, 1963

 

When she made sure you had practiced for your music lesson...

 
 Haddon Hubbard Sundblom's fiction illustration, Ladies Home Journal, Jan. 1936.

 

And made sure you ate a healthy, germ-free breakfast...

 
  Listerine advertisement, Delineator, Feburary 1930

 

So this Sunday, make sure to do something nice for her.

 
  Al Parker's December 1939 Ladies Home Journal cover

 

Offer to do some of the housework  ...

 
 Bon Ami advertisement, Delineator, May 1929

 

Or help with the laundry ...

 
   McCall's cover by Haddon Hubbard Sundblom, March 1933.

 

You could always give her flowers ...

Shredded Wheat advertisement, McCalls, April 1930.

 

Or just give her a hug...

 

Fiction illustration by Al Parker for Joy Street, by Betty Gor, McCalls, Feb. 1949

 

And wish her a Happy Mother's Day!

Al Parker's Jane's Blanket drawing and fiction illustrations are part of the Al Parker Collection. The Haddon Hubbard Sundblom illustrations and John Gannam's Balanced Pacific Sheets advertisements are part of the Charles Craver Collection.  Advertisements from Delineator and McCalls are from the Periodicals Collection. 

 

May Day Outfit Suggestions

Modern Graphic History Library wishes you a Happy May Day! 

In order to celebrate, you will need something nice to wear.  Why not make a paper dress?  It's economical and easy to make, plus very fashionable. (Just be careful sitting down, so your hard work doesn't get crumpled or torn!)

Ladies Home Journal, May 1913

To create these dresses, you will need:

• paper
• stiff netting
• ribbon
• appliqués
• paste (to glue the appliqués on the paper)
• strong thread (to sew the paper onto a white slip) 

This assumes you have a white slip to use as the foundation for the dress.  If not, you can easily buy one at a local department store for 75¢, or you can just use an old white dress you no longer want.

Ladies Home Journal, May 1913

The violet dress is the least expensive to create at $1.10.  The rosebud dress only costs $1.45, but you save 25¢ if you can leave off the rose leaves on the hat.  The most expensive outfit is the daisy dress, at $2.60. 

A leaflet with full instructions for the dresses is available by sending a self-addressed stamped envelope to the magazine.

Ladies Home Journal, May 1913

The children and teens will also need outfits, but paper dresses probably aren't the best option.  For something more durable, check out these "May styles" from Butterick. 

Delineator, May 1929

Patterns (with instructions and finishing ideas) range between 30¢ - 50¢, with most costing just 35¢.  You can order your patterns through the mail, or stop in at the Butterick store in St. Louis (located on Pine.)

Delineator, May 1929

Now that you have something to wear, you can enjoy the May Day Festivities, courtesy of University Archives.

All of the dress images are from Modern Graphic History Library's Periodicals Collection.

Spring Cleaning with MGHL

Now that it's Spring, it's time for all the fun and excitement that comes from spring cleaning.  Yes, spring cleaning is supposed to be fun-- you will be smiling the entire time.  For those of you feeling skeptical about this and need proof, see below...

For all scrubing all of your wooden items, you will need Old Dutch Cleanser, at only 10¢ a can.  Don't worry: it comes with full instructions, so you can smile as you scrub.

 
   Advertisement in Ladies Home Journal, September 1913.

For the rest of the house, you can rely on Bon Ami.  It promises it will not scratch as it cleans, so you can happily wash the windows, the mirrors, the bathtub, and the woodwork.

 
   Advertisement in Ladies Home Journal, April 1911.

After you have cleaned your woodwork, you will need to continue to dust it.  With your free sample of Liquid Veneer, you will be one of millions of women around the world happily singing a dusting song. 

 
   Advertisement in Ladies Home Journal, April 1911.

When it comes time to clean the floors, you will need an O'Cedar Polish Mop, which promises that mopping and polishing will be "just like play." The mop costs between $1 - $1.50, and the polish only costs 25¢. You can try the mop risk-free for two days.

  Advertisement in Ladies Home Journal, December 1913.

After you've done all this work, you can't forget to clean the carpets.  For that, have a Hoover representative come to your house to demonstrate a vacuum, ranging from $59.50 - $135.

  Advertisement in Delineator, April 1929.

Now that your Spring Cleaning is finished, you should have brightened your day (as well as your house.)  However, if you are still feeling sad, a handsome stranger could always approach you and say:

"You could wash all the floors you wanted to in my house."

 Al Parker illustration for the short story Little Things are Big Things by Alice A. Fraser,  appearing in the August 1935 Woman's Home Companion.

All of the advertisements can be found in the MGHL's Periodicals collection, which includes Ladies Home Journal, Delineator, and McCalls.  The Al Parker fiction illustration is part of the Charles Craver tearsheet collection.  Happy Spring Cleaning!

Thrill Seekers Exhibit Now Available Online

Remember that exhibit we mentioned a few weeks ago? Well, in case you aren't able to visit Olin Library, you can now view Thrill Seekers: The Rise of Men's Magazines online.

Like the in-person exhibit, the digital companion features the original artwork, tear sheets, and whole issues of mid-century magazines like Esquire, Playboy, Sports Illustrated, and Fortune, as well as lesser-known pulp fiction titles and girlie magazines. The exhibit draws on several of MGHL's collections and includes items like Robert Andrew Parker's illustrations for Vladimir Nabokov's fiction, Al Parker's take on the Monaco Grand Prix, 1930's ads from Esquire, Robert Weaver's illustrations for James Bond stories, and Ernest Trova's version of the Playboy bunny. The digital exhibit contains over 60 images -- some of which we weren't able to include in the in-person exhibit -- as well as a few additional features like recommending reading and relevant digital resources.

Below is one of our favorites -- an original Robert Andrew Parker watercolor for a Nabokov story that appeared in a 1965 issue of Playboy. To see more, check out Thrill Seekers online.

MGHL's Exhibit Thrill Seekers at Olin Library

MGHL's exhibit Thrill Seekers: The Rise of Men's Magazines opens today at Washington University's Olin Library. The exhibit charts the growth of men's magazines from the 1940s to the 1960s, and highlights original artwork, tear sheets, and whole issues of Esquire, Playboy, Sports Illustrated, and Fortune, as well as pulp fiction and girlie magazines. Artists featured include Al Parker, Robert Weaver, Ernest Trova, and Robert Andrew Parker, among others. The exhibit will be on display in the Ginkgo Reading Room and Grand Staircase Lobby until January 4, 2013. A digital version of the exhibit is forthcoming, but in the meantime, you can check out a few highlights below.

This Stetson hat advertisement, illustrated by Edwin Georgi, appeared in the June 1939 issue of Esquire

1950 issue of the pulp magazine Adventure

1966 issue of Debonair

 August 1957 cover of Fortune by Robert Andrew Parker

This article, illustrated by Robert Weaver, appeared in the April 1959 issue of Esquire

The December 1979 issue of Playboy featured this three-panel "Do It Yourself" insert by Ernest Trova

Back to School Shopping with MGHL

Classes have begun, but do you have everything you need? Take a look at these advertisements -- you may see a few things you forgot. All images are from the Periodicals Collections or the Charles Craver Collection.

Blazers and loafers make "the perfect outfit." This Penaljo ad appeared in the September 1951 issue of the travel magazine Holiday.

As this 1951 ad (also from Holiday) notes, "no back-to-school wardrobe is complete without a Troy Robe!"

This article from the September 1929 issue of The Delineator gives an overview of what every young woman should take to college, including a tweed suit (Figure C) and a fur coat (Figure A).

This 1946 ad illustrated by Pete Hawley promises that a Jantzen girdle will "give the figure proper verve." We especially like the bulletin board in the background full of college-related ephemera, including a photo of a pipe-smoking boyfriend.

Race, Ethnicity, & Identity at the Modern Graphic History Library

We've created a new research guide for anyone interested in researching race and ethnicity in the Modern Graphic History Library's collections. It provides an overview of what kind of materials and images we have and how to find them, relevant digital image collections, and recommended books. The guide draws from four different collections and highlights relevant original artwork, magazines, tear sheets, children's books, comic books, graphic novels, and zines.

A few images, along with more information about the collections represented in the guide, are included below. Check out the Race, Ethnicity, and Identity at MGHL research guide to see more, and don't forget to take a look at our recent guides about Advertisements and Women in Popular Culture if you haven't already.

Illustration from the Robert Weaver Collection. Weaver was dedicated to capturing the changing social and cultural climate of his times, and this collection is particularly strong in mid-century depictions of African Americans.

Illustration from A Great Miracle Happened There: A Chanukah Story, part of the Robert Andrew Parker Collection. Parker has illustrated over 40 children's books, several of which deal with race and ethnicity. The collection contains original artwork as well as published books.

The above comic is part of the Center for the Humanities Comics Collection which is comprised of thousands of comic books, predominantly published between 1960 and 2000. The collection contains a particularly strong selection of titles featuring African American super heroes and protagonists. This collection also includes graphic novels, magazines, and zines dealing with race and ethnicity.

Illustration by Stevan Dohanos, from the Charles Craver Collection. This collection contains hundreds of tear sheets of illustrated fiction, nonfiction, and advertisements from the 1930s to the 1950s by dozens of important mid-century illustrators. A list of illustrators relevant to researchers of race and ethnicity is available on the Craver page of the research guide.

Mario Cooper Illustrating Agatha Christie

During her lifetime, British mystery writer Agatha Christie published 66 detective novels. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s -- the peak of Christie's career -- in the U.S. these works often first appeared as serials in magazines like Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, and Redbook, giving fans an opportunity to read and follow a story months before the book's publication.  While many artists illustrated her work, perhaps no illustrator collaborated with her more than Mario Cooper; by our count his illustrations accompany at least 8 of her novels that appeared in Collier's. Cooper's illustrations for Christie's fiction are striking, economical, and bring a bit of glamor to detective fiction. All of the images below are tear sheets from the Charles Craver Collection. To learn more about the collection or Mario Cooper, check out the collection's finding aid.

Cooper's first illustrations for Christie were Appointment with Death, which Collier's published in nine installments from August 28 to October 23, 1937. This novel, as all of the others in this post, feature Christie's best-known and most frequently used character, the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. The amazing sky in the background of the first image reveals Cooper's expertise with watercolors; for many years he taught the medium, and from 1959 to 1986 was president of the American Watercolor Society.

Murder for Christmas (published in the UK as Hercule Poirot’s Christmas) followed Appointment with Death. It appeared in ten parts in Collier's from November 12, 1938 to January 14, 1939. This illustration (like the one below from The Patriotic Murders) has relatively few components, but the simple, if slightly off composition and bold color perfectly convey the tension in Christie's fiction.

Sad Cypress appeared in Collier's in ten parts from November 25, 1939 to January 27, 1940. Reviews of the novel ranged from modestly positive to lukewarm, perhaps the inevitable result of being the follow up to the wildly popular And Then There Were None, Christie's biggest success and the best-selling mystery of all time.

The Patriotic Murders (published under the name One Two, Buckle My Shoe in the UK) appeared in nine installments from August 3 to September 28, 1940.

A Look at John Gannam’s Pacific Balanced Sheets Advertisements

This week's post was written by MGHL's student worker Kara Gordon. Kara is helping us digitize tear sheets in the Charles Craver Collection and came across a series of Balanced Pacific Sheets ads illustrated by John Gannam. To learn more about Gannam, check out the Charles Craver Collection finding aid.

I can’t count the number of times that I’ve seen the illustration of a girl on a bed reading the comics section of the newspaper ("Gone Gal"). Whether it comes up in a classroom slideshow or on my tumblr dashboard, it is an iconic illustration, even 65 years after its original publication.

Life, September 27, 1948

I had no idea that it was an ad for bed sheets.

John Gannam actually did several illustrations for the Pacific Balanced Sheets campaign during the 1940's. Advertisements, unlike fiction, are property of a corporation, rather than the publication itself. In other words, you see the same advertisement pop up in several magazines. Such is the case with the "Fair Morning" illustration, which in 1946 appeared both in an April issue of Life and May issue of Ladies’ Home Journal.

Life, April 29, 1946

Ladies' Home Journal, May 1946

Aside from the obvious scale shift to fit the format of the magazines, there are other discrepancies between the printings of this illustration. Life’s version is slightly cropped, making the woman an even larger component of the composition. The text, because of the format size, is spread out over three lines rather than four, giving the illustration even more prominence on the page. The most noticeable difference, however, is the color. The version in Ladies’ Home Journal was printed with significantly more magenta than the one in Life. The result is two completely different color atmospheres: a cooler spring morning in Life, a warm summer in Ladies’ Home Journal, all because of the percentage of magenta used on the same illustration.

Women in Pop Culture at the Modern Graphic History Library

We've created a new research guide about mid-century depictions of women in popular culture. Women as girlfriends, wives, single girls, mothers, homemakers, workers, consumers, rebels, femme fatales, even superheroes...they're all here. The guide provides an overview of what kind of materials and images we have in our collections and how to find them, recommended books, and an image gallery. It will be particularly helpful to users interested in 20th century ideas about gender roles, domesticity, consumerism, sexuality, and feminism. A few highlights are included below. Check out the Women in Popular Culture at MGHL research guide to see more.

Al Parker ad for American Airlines, from Ladies' Home Journal, September 1950

From the Al Parker Collection

Al Parker illustration for Ladies' Home Journal, August 1946

From the Al Parker Collection

Ladies' Home Journal, August 1912

From the Periodicals Collections

Wonder Woman #137

From the Center for the Humanities Comics Collection (A new collection we're currently preparing for public use. We'll have more information about it very soon!)

Edwin Georgi illustration from The Saturday Evening Post, December 1944

From the Charles Craver Collection