Outdated Advertising ─ Sexist, Racist, Creepy, and Just Plain Tasteless Ads from a Pre-PC Era

Outdated Advertising: Memories from a Less-than-PC Era takes a look at print advertising from the mid-1850s through the 1980s with an eye toward ads that were notorious for their sexist, racist, politically-incorrect, or other wildly inappropriate content—or for just plain bad taste. Among the dozens of full-color examples, readers will find:

a woman being spanked by her husband for not buying the right coffee

the story of a mother having to turn her child over to an orphanage because her late husband didn’t keep up his life insurance payments

Aunt Jemima declaring “Happy days is here!” because of her new pancake recipe

doctors promoting particular brands of cigarettes

the Michael Jackson Rainbow Brite portable record player with the copy line, “Gifts to keep children singing.”

Advertising has changed over the decades—that is a major understatement. Despite the nostalgia of such shows as Mad Men, the outrageous images in Outdated Advertising show readers just how far we’ve come since then.

Stephen Spignesi is a bestselling author of more than sixty titles, including books about Stephen King, the Beatles, American and world history, the Titanic, George Washington and the American Presidents, the Founding Fathers, John F. Kennedy Jr., world disasters, Robin Williams, and Woody Allen. His novel Dialogues was hailed as a “reinvention of the psychological thriller.”