The Secret History of Ads in Books

by: Jennifer Schuessler



Advertising inserted into a 1972 science-fiction paperback by A. E. Van Vogt.

Amazon’s announcement that it will start selling an advertising-supported Kindle at a discounted price has provoked some grumbling about the commercialization of the reading experience.


But books haven’t always been an ad-free zone, as this 2007 essay by Paul Collins from the Book Review shows. Back in the mid-19th century, readers of Dickens serials were bombarded with paeans to Freeman’s Spermazine Wax Lights and Dr. Lucock’s Pulmonic Wafers. And in the 1960s and 1970s, you could hardly open a mass-market paperback without encountering a pitch for Q-Tips, Sanka or Canadian Club.


But the bulk of the advertising, Collins wrote, came from cigarette companies, who were looking for new ways to push their product after the 1969 federal ban on television and radio advertising. By 1975, the Lorillard Tobacco Company had placed ads in some 540 million paperbacks. The focus was mainly on pulp titles like “Purr, Baby, Purr” and “Group Sex,” but Lorillard also placed ads in some 74,000 copies of Toni Morrison’s novel, “The Bluest Eye.”

Authors and readers alike assailed the ads, with one columnist lamenting, “We will see the day when we turn a page of Hemingway or Wolfe … and the next page will say Are Your Underarms Really With It?” The ads began to fade away in the early 1980s, thanks in part to new author contracts forbidding unauthorized ads.

But Amazon’s partners in its new Kindle venture may take comfort from the fact that the ads seemed to work. According to one 1972 study, while readers claimed to dislike the idea of advertising in books, after actual exposure their negative feelings declined while brand awareness climbed.


from: NY Times