Saturday, December 13, 2008

Pageant Magazine - August 1951

By far the coolest magazine from the initial release, and maybe ever, is this Aug 1951 issue of Pageant magazine.

On the surface it looks just like any other digest-type magazine of the era, complete with starlet cover girl. But the back cover tells of the amazing Alice content inside!

Some marketing genius decided to publish a set of Alice playing cards in this issue. And not only that, said genius actually devised a way to get people to buy MULTIPLE copies in order to do it! What I like best about this is the fact that they are just brazen about it, they even joke about it in the copy on the page that explains how to do it.

"Ahem!" exclaimed the Printer. "But the cards will be printed back-to-back. One card on one side, another card on the other. You can't paste 'em!"

"Oh, you silly!" exclaimed Alice. "That's easy. Just tell the kids to get an extra copy of Pageant. They can paste up one side of a page from one copy, and the other side from the other copy. Then cut out each card."

"Great, great," said the Circulation Man. "Very smart child."






I must say though, I have never come across any of these created cards, just this magazine.

2 comments:

Vintage Disneyland Tickets said...

WOW, thats a neat magazine! Great marketing idea, "just buy more issues". I miss paste, those "glue sticks" are junk!

Snow White Archive said...

Hadn't seen these before. Very cool.