This month I received a request from Craig, one of our trustees. “Do you have a 1926 advert for the Du Pont DUCO paint process?” Not a chance, I thought, as nothing immediately sprang to mind – so I politely told Craig this and thought nothing more of it. The following week I was cataloguing some 1925 National Geographic adverts and came across an advert for the self-same thing. I quickly scanned ahead to 1926 and found to my great delight that their advertising campaign continued into 1926. A quick scan later and I was able to send the image over to Craig. Another satisfied customer.

When I have finished this batch of scanning I may well feature the Du Pont campaign in one of our newsletter blogs.

These research requests highlight the importance of having the Advert Database. From hard experience of searching through magazine after magazine looking for a specific advert or article (often to no avail), it becomes a pleasure to spend just a few seconds doing a database search and knowing you have/have not got the item you are looking for. Over time we hope to build our volunteer base and be able to scan as much of the archive as possible, enabling us to satisfy more and more research requests. The 14,509 we have so far is a small but significant step in the right direction.

Is there a special project you are researching for an academic journal or a special interest club newsletter? Get in touch with us to locate advertising to compliment your writing. We have a wide collection of over 100,000 items just waiting to be discovered.

Thanks for reading, Richard