Mid-Century Ads: Advertising from the Mad Men Era

I don’t have to tell you how brilliant Mad Men is do I? How its fusion of socio-cultural themes and personal crises creates a television series that largely exists in a class of its own? No, didn’t think so. Anyway this beautiful new two volume book celebrates the fruits of real life Don Drapers’ labours at a time when New York’s finest repackaged the American Dream for the optimistic post-war era. Editor Jim Heimann is a cultural anthropologist and graphic design historian, and thus a better curator of this kind of material it is hard to imagine, with lucid, nuanced analysis alongside the cracking visuals.