Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Hand-Drawn Thompson's Ad

One longtime tenant of the Thomson building was, duh, O. E. Thompson, natch. Dusty D was digging around in the "miscellaneous business" file the other day and found this gem--a hand-drawn ad, pencil marks still visible, for Thompson's Grass Seeders. This was a piece of artist's drawing-board or craft-board that would be taken down to the local paper; note the note to the printer: "this size." The drawing area is about 4.5 inches square.

The seeder may have been a device of Thompson's own invention. Thompson was a prolific inventor and produced several of his inventions right there in the Thompson Building.

Some of his inventions include a root-cutter, a kraut cutter (very much like a modern kitchen mandoline, at right), and two different fertilizer distributors.

Not to be snarky, Dusty D loves how the advertisement's word "original" is put in "quotes."

Those who love to decry what they perceive as illiteracy in supermarket "signs" and the like can see that such "mistakes" have an old "precedent."

2 comments :

Fritz Passow said...

I like the lettering of "Fig. 1", "Fig. 2", etc. in the drawing. They look ready to zip across the page.

Someone had fun doing those. :D

Dusty D said...

Yeah, you see a lot of stylistic fonts on these old patent drawings, kind of like a flourish. Clearly there was no need to write "fig. 1" in anything other than a straight-up font; they drew them like that just for fun it appears.