Ancient Whisky

Old ads

Old whisky ads, dated and explained

Whisky advertising printed in the United States from 1880 to 1915, mostly from a San Francisco trade paper almost nobody has looked at since. Each ad has the publication, city and date it ran, and a note on what was going on in the trade that year.

15 ads

1880s and 1890s

Mellwood, Woodcock, Rip Van Winkle, Monongahela rye, Quinine Whisky and the first ads selling the 1897 bottled in bond stamp.

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9 ads

1900s

a chemist's purity certificate, Sunny Side All Rye, Sunny Brook's World's Fair medal, Old Kirk after the San Francisco fire, and Cedar Brook.

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7 ads

1910s

Old Taylor's castle and its court injunction, Old Kirk, Roderick Dhu Scotch, James E. Pepper by mail and Cedar Brook selling a dead judge.

See the ads

Most of these come from the Pacific Wine and Spirit Review, the San Francisco liquor trade journal founded in 1878. The San Francisco Public Library scanned its bound volumes in color and put them on the Internet Archive. The rest are prints the Library of Congress holds from copyright deposits. Every image here was checked for its publication date. Ads with racist images are not on these pages. They are kept on a separate page, Offensive Advertising, with a warning, because that history should still be seen.

Sources

  1. Pacific Wine and Spirit Review, San Francisco Public Library copies, Internet Archive. archive.org
  2. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, popular graphic arts. loc.gov
  3. Puck, Internet Archive. archive.org