Online Archive of Ivory Soap Advertisements

No radio, soap! The National Museum of American History now has an online archive of 1,600 advertisements and related ephemera covering Ivory Soap advertising from 1838-1998. This collection includes advertising, soap wrappers, coupons, etc. It's available at http://www.americanhistory.si.edu/archives/ivory/ .

There's a basic keyword search on the front page but I preferred the advanced search, which lets you search by date, collection title (the Ivory Soap and a few other collections are available) form & genre (signs, calendars, bookmarks, postcards, etc.), and keywords (from Actors to Zuni Indians.)

I chose signs from the Ivory collection, and got over 1200 results (including obvious print ads -- is the genre search broken?). Interestingly the first three results were for non-English advertisements (two in Hebrew, one in Polish.) Results include a large thumbnail of the image, the title, creator, date, collection name, and filename. There's a link to a full record which also provides a description of the advertising, its condition, genre, and keywords/subjects. There's a larger image on this page with a link to a still larger image, large enough to read the writing in the advertisements.

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