They Laughed When I Sat Down: An Informal History of Advertising in Words and Pictures

From Lydia E. Pinkham to Pink Tooth Brush; from P. T. Barnum to BBDO, here is the colorful, humorous story of eighty years of American advertising. With over 200 illustrations (mostly the wonderfully amusing ads themselves) and bright text, "They laughed When I Sat Down", tells about the jingles, slogans, famous ad campaigns, and trademarks of American business - and the free-wheeling geniuses who created them. Perhaps the prototype of the American adman was the great showman P. T. Barnum, and Mr. Rowsome makes a memorable chronicle of Barnum's successes at promoting freak shows and other entertainment - with ingenious publicity stunts and lurid prose borrowed from patent medicine promotion. for it was patent medicine which provided the great impetus to the infant ad industry. Intrepid copywriters often created bogus diseases like "creeping numbness" and "dragging sensation in the groin" to be treated by their Pulmonic Syrups and Sea Weed Tonics. The great breakfast cereal wars proved the unmatched powers of advertising to sell new and unfamiliar products. This books tells of the continuing struggles for sales supremacy among Charley Post, the Kellogg brothers, and other cereal makers - a bizarre combat of "edited" testimonials, box top premiums, and extravagant copy - including such memorable creations as the slogan "There's a reason" and Forces' benign trademark, "Sunny Jim". Nowhere is the book more amusing than when it deals with automobile advertising - long dominated by Henry ford, with his remarkable flair for getting free publicity and his genius in promoting dramatically the Tin Lizzie and the Model A. In other chapters, the author examines the headline come-ons and purple prose text of American mail order advertising. he concludes with a thoughtful discussion of some of the problems of advertising today. The author, Frank Rowsome, Jr., was an editor and a writer for Popular Science Magazine.