A History Of Advertising

A History Of Advertising, by Stephane Pincas and Marc Loiseau, presents a history of advertising from 1842 (the founding of the world's first advertising agency, in Philadelphia) to 2006 (when this book was first published, titled Born In 1842).

The emphasis is on images, with each page containing several colour reproductions of posters and stills from TV commercials. This is in contrast to Mark Tungate's Adland, which contains almost no photographs at all. The text in A History Of Advertising amounts to little more than extended picture captions, however, and the advertisements included are all American, British, or (occasionally) European, so the scope is not really international. There is an impressive bibliography, though.

The book was originally published privately by the advertising agency Publicis, and this new commercial edition is published by Taschen. The many Publicis references in the text feel too self-congratulatory, and should have been removed for this edition. I'd been hoping for a long time that either Taschen or Laurence King would produce a book such as this, and it is certainly the best available, if not the best possible, historical survey of advertising images.