Vintage Liquor Ads

I've had a fascination with liquor ads since middle school. Let me rephrase that: I've had a fascination with Absolut vodka ads since middle school. I can still remember afternoons spent at my friend's house flipping through stacks of her dad's old New Yorkers in search of the ads. I caught on quickly that Absolut had a lot of advertising dollars to spend in the '90s and would regularly advertise on the back cover of major magazines like Saveur, The New Yorker, and Savoy. (Anyone in the publishing biz knows that the back cover is an expensive piece of real estate.) I kept each of my found ads in its own plastic sleeve and hid them away in a binder in my closet. I don't know who the art director was, but I was obsessed with his or her creativity. I followed websites that painstakingly recorded the whereabouts of every single ad and which magazine it ran in. Now that the statute of limitations has run out, I can freely say that I would go to the public library with a razor blade and slice the ads from circulating magazines (God I feel better finally getting that off my chest). Looking back I'm glad I never got caught, but took glee in the adrenaline rush of it all. I forgot about my collection until today, a lazy Saturday afternoon. In searching for ads on ebay, I stumbled upon a slew of other, older liquor ads that date back long before my time. Until I can dig up my binder of Absolut ads (I'm pretty sure it's buried in my storage locker) and scan them to share with you all, here are a few ads on ebay that caught my eye:

1937 National Distillers Products Corporation (source: ebay)

1934 Myers Rum (source: ebay)

1939 Martini & Rossi (source: ebay)

1981 Southern Comfort (source: ebay)

1966 Ronrico Rum (source: ebay)

1967 Jose Cuervo (source: ebay)

1945 Dewars (source: ebay)

1974 Pernod (source: ebay)

1994 Absolut (source: ebay)

A quick note on this last one: This may look like a photo, but it's really a painting. It was designed by artist Yrjo Edelmann. A misspelled version ran without the second "n." It's incredibly rare and if you have an original, you're one lucky mofo. I'm still looking.