If you will, please indulge me in some more book cataloguing fun. I’m still cataloguing those twelve Overland Monthly magazines from 1887-1889. The advertisements are alternately instructive:
Ad for mining equipment.
amusing:
I’m afraid to ask what these are for.
confusing:
I think this is some type of early asthma inhaler.
and poignant:
There are many ads like this one, for bookstores. When I saw how many San Francisco bookstores and bookbinders advertised in one magazine, I truly realize that there are far fewer bookstores currently open in San Francisco — perhaps everywhere.
See you in the stacks!
Something tells me those 4 P’s in the second ad, were laxatives.
Simply amazing! - Just yesterday I was reading the following in Billy Baxter’s Letters by Wm J. Kountz, Jr. (First Published 1899 - Duquesne Distributing Co - Now available in e-text)
(Advert following the second letter, “One Night”…)
~~~~~
Horse Sense
Sometimes you eat too much, sometimes you drink too much, and
sometimes you do both. In any event, you feel like the very old
scratch the next morning. Too much liquor overheats the blood.
Too much food, and the liver goes on a strike. The first remedy
which should suggest itself is a purgative which will act on the
liver, and cleanse the system of all the indigestible junk with
which it has been overtaxed. This is positively the foundation
for permanent relief. The next thing is to cool the blood. Now,
isn’t it common horse sense?
Think it over.
~~~~~
And now I see you are selling Pierce’s Pleasant Purgative Pellets. Excellent!
Please send me a bag of ‘em. I’ll pay you next Wednesday.
Carbolic Smoke Ball!?!?!?
Tell your lawyer friends, assuming they are common-law and not Civilians. (Civilians won’t get the joke.)