Just curious - Scribners Magazine Car Ads - useful to anyone?

[mlavin73]

Hello - 

 

My father has several Scribner Magazines from the early 1900's. There are a lot of ads in the magazine for cars. He's wondering if anyone would find them useful when trying to see specific details on the cars. Is there a market for that or can everyone pretty much find all of the images they need on the internet? Here is an example of what I'm talking about. 

[Terry Bond]

Magazines are an odd commodity these days.  With so much available on the internet, as you suggested, there is not much interest in the publication itself. 

 

There are two schools of thought on them - first is to preserve the magazine completely intact, but unless you collect Scribner's, Colliers, National Geographics,  etc. etc. there isn't much demand for them. Even specific brand collectors have a tough time with storage.  Without indexing how do you find anything?  Computerized resources are so much easier to use and you don't have storage problems. 

 

The other school of thought is to cut them apart, catalog the car ads (or other info) into a much smaller easier to use format and discard the remains.   Some of us cringe at the thought of destroying anything old, but with so many of these common magazines around is there really any harm in doing that?  

 

Short answer - yes the ads are interesting, but the magazines - not much.  Monetary value - zilch.

Terry

[mlavin73]

Thank you for your feedback, Terry! I was thinking along the lines of cataloging the car ads. I just keep going back to "why would someone pay for this old ad of a car?" My Dad says it's so they can see the details on the car. I say you can google the details of the car. 

 

Perhaps I try looking for a magazine collector who may be interested in them. 

 

Again, thank you for your time and thoughts. 

[JV Puleo]

I would say the printed ads are invaluable. The internet is wildly overrated in this...99% of what you will find there is reproduced at far too low a resolution to be the slightest bit useful for details...keep in mind that computer resolution is 72 dots per inch...the minimal print resolution for digitized images is 300 dots per inch. Most of those ads are period half-tones or line drawings...the halftones are barely reproducible with the best equipment and, even there, you are going to get what's called a "moray" pattern in the dots. Very few people do a professional job of reproducing them - or know how - so 99.9% of what you'll find on the internet is junk. Drawings are a lot better in that they can be reproduced at a higher resolution but all of this takes up band width (I think that's the term) ... and, since you can't see the difference on your screen, it is rarely done.

 

After nearly 50 years in the printing and publishing industry, I'm sick to death with being told how "everything can be found on the internet." The internet is a great source if you are researching a high school term paper...it is fine for finding library indexes where you can then go to the original materials but it is vastly over rated as a research tool in it's own right.

[Jim Skelly]

Not only is the Internet vastly overrated, search engines are very quick with results, but not accurate results.  Looking for a particular photographic image or ad is also frustrating since you hit on many images that are incorrectly categorized. 

[Terry Bond]

There is also in inherent problem with "ads" when thinking of them in terms of providing accuracy of information.  The vast majority of the illustrations are artist renderings, and as such, can well represent a degree of "artistic license."  Some things shown in these ads as a result are historically inaccurate.  I've seen seen ads for cars that were never produced, or at least not beyond the design or prototype stage.  Color ads are particularly troublesome when trying to determine the colors or trim that may have been available for a particular vehicle.  I once looked at a freshly restored Model T Torpedo that was painted a gaudy shade of purple.  When asked about it, the owner produced an early magazine ad that showed the paint color he had matched. 

Ads are interesting to collect, and I have binder of them.  Many years ago my mother hauled home a ton of early National Geographic magazines that a neighbor threw out.  She clipped all the car ads and put them in a notebook for my birthday.  In the 1980s, while living in Scotland, I purchased a pile of early 1900s Autocar magazines, many of them eaten away at the edges by mice unfortunately, but for those in "throw-away" condition. I did salvage the ads for some fascinating early European cars, and even some early American cars exported to Europe.  It's a fascinating collection.  

Terry
 

[Walt G]

Very solid and correct comments here , especially for author's who pen the stories written for car magazines. Internet data can be very interesting but also less then accurate. Second hand, second generation information. Of course trying to find what really happened or how a car was built one would have to try to locate the source who did indeed do that - hard to find a person to validate exactly how something was done for a vehicle built even 50 years ago now. All statements about using period sales material , especially magazine ads is totally correct. Print runs and the amount of ink used can even vary from a run of magazines printed one day to what is done days later.

The magazine ads can be interesting but as Terry states often are hard to preserve even if in excellent condition due to the acid content in the paper. Ever try and look at a 80+ year old newspaper? The ads for local dealerships of car sales showrooms are great but everything is usually so very very fragile. When I scan a period 8 x 10 photograph in my collection to use in an article I do so at 600dpi nothing  less.

[JV Puleo]

Here's a good example of why the internet is unreliable...this is a fairly well known photo from WWI of two officers of the FANY, the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, an all-female British unit that served in that war, WWII and still exists today.

 

 

The internet caption tells us this is a Ford ambulance nicknamed "Flossie". I've no way of telling if that was the nickname of this ambulance but it's a Crossley - a very popular chassis for ambulance work. I will bet that this picture has been used dozens of times with the wrong caption by multiple people who don't have any idea what a Ford of that period should look like. The picture is identified as being taken at Calais in 1915 but if they got the make of the ambulance wrong – it doesn't look anything like a Ford – how can you be sure they got anything else right?

Edited December 7, 2020 by JV Puleo (see edit history)