All the tricks, guilt trips and assumptions-between-thelines in advertising today have their roots somewhere in this book. It’s the kind of book you can pore over, like a family album. Its most recent ad ran in 1959, and its earliest ones go back to the dawn of Advertising itself, in the 1850s. Yet the book’s still in print and I refer to my copy often. The editor’s unabashed commentary and the ads themselves are full of unintentionally revealing glimpses into a profession with one of the weirdest builtin attitudes around — a mix of creativity, craftsmanship and unashamed prostitution. The attitude is quite charming at times, especially in some of its little-old-New-York manifestations.
Oh yeah, the book was intended to teach how to write ad copy, and you can use it that way. But its value, its heartbreaking importance, lies in the way it bares the roots of those media tendrils which poke their way so deeply in to most of us.
