JF Ptak Science Books: German Design Elements: Miniature Advertising Art, 1880-1930

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 1006

The Illustriete Zeitung, published in Leipzig beginning in 1855, was a popular, middle-road/middle-class Life-like magazine. I have a long run of this big, well-written, sumptuously-illustrated journal, beginning about 1870 and extending though the end of the war in 1945, and at this point I've looked through just about every issue. It is fascinating on many levels, and has proved to be a valuable source of historical minutiae as well as an excellent resource for images and graphical displays of quantitative data. One aspect that I've never looked at very closely though are the advertisements--actually, the miniature advertisements. There are thousands of them sprinkled throughout the magazine, the thyme on the rice, the za'tar on the bagel.

Here are three decent examples showing the complexity and superior design of these little bits: the top-right image is only an inch square, and was published in 1924; the slim image just above is only an inch tall, while the example below-right is smaller yet, about a third (!) of an inch 'round.

I've decided to begin to reproduce some of them here, mainly because so many of them are gorgeous design elements, many of which just don't exist past the pages of this journal.

One thing that I've done with them is to construct "Onkel Karl's Berlin Glass Diary", a series of microscope slides with these small images as specimens illustrating the imaginary diary of Karl Muefler as he strolls the streets of Berlin in 1925 looking for "missing paper". The original images are all very small, generally smaller than an American penny, and can be fantastic: sometimes there are thirty of them clustered on one of the Illustriete Zeitung's back advertising pages.