If you’re in the habit of second hand shopping for books at the Mitchell Dump you end up with a rather strange collection on your reading pile. One of my finds is a falling-apart Penguin paperback (it’ll probably last one more read and that’s it) first published 1952. It’s called The Shocking History Of Advertising and it’s written by E.S. Turner.
I imagine it’s something Peggy Olsen would’ve read, if Peggy Olsen existed and wasn’t just a character on Mad Men. I imagine such a character would have read everything about advertising that she could have laid her hands on. In which case, the antics in the SC&P Office probably wouldn’t have shocked her all that much.
Here is my favourite passage from the book:
Almost every social foible was reflected sooner or later in the advertising columns. At the end of the [eighteenth] century a country gentleman in Lancashire was advertising for a recluse to sit permanently underground in his hermitage, for 50 pounds a year. The successful candidate had to be willing to let his hair and nails grow as long as possible.
The main thing I got out of this book is the answer to a question I’ve wondered since starting to poke about on this newfandangled thing called The Internet: Are humans really as strange as cyberspace would suggest, or is the medium the message, so to speak, making humans seem weirder simply because we’ve found each other online?
Using the above as evidence, weird humans have always attempted to find partners in weird, and though they may have been unsuccessful in their unions, humans have always been weird.