Our new landmark: a quarter of a million advertising items!

We have something to celebrate and want to share it with you. At the Richard Roberts Archive we have just catalogued our 250,000th item! We thought this would be a great opportunity to show off the range of advertising material we love to collect, preserve and make freely available.

 Regular readers will know about the huge range of magazines, newspapers, brochures and catalogues we have, and we’ll continue to share each week samples from our both collection and what’s just arrived on our doormat. Remember, our collection goes back to the 1840s, with our ad for Cordings, the waterproofer and outfitter (featured in Report from the chair (December 2024) — The Richard Roberts Archive), and goes right up to the present day. I like to think of these as our two-dimensional items.

But before I move onto our three-dimensional, a quick word about our chief cataloguer Paul, who has reminded us that his first job was to catalogue a monster collection of 3,000 Shooting Times magazines. We had had to do three trips in the van to get this lot back to our archive. Paul recalled, with only a hint of bitterness, that, doing a day a week, it took him months. To honour him we’re sharing a sample cover here and one of their ads, for ICI’s ‘Alphamax’ shotgun cartridges.

So, three dimensional. We’re posting some pictures to give you an idea of other advertising ephemera held at the archive. These include a set of mugs specially made for the nighttime-drink makers Bournvita, with ‘Sweet dreams with Bournvita’ stamped on their undersides. We think ours is fairly modern (2000s) and was probably sold as Bournvita-badged merchandise. The use of a mug as an advertisement is very clever, even more so when they are of good quality, and you’d find yourself saying when offered a drink, ‘I’ll have the Bournvita mug’. Subconscious product placement is going on here.

Then there’s Bibendum, the Michelin character. Lest we forget what Michelin do, Bibendum is kicking a car tyre, and there’s the logo underneath ‘Switch to Michelin’. This particular campaign was a very shrewd move for Michelin. Bibendum, or, the ‘Michelin man’, first appeared promoting Michelin tyres in 1898 and remains an unmistakeable icon to this day. Our Bibendum is a bone china moulding made in 2003 by Royal Doulton with a limited run of 2,000 (ours is #841), but curiously used the 1980s’ style (going by the style of writing of the word ‘Michelin’ and comparing it with period ads). It was manufactured with the permission of Michelin and used as a sales promotion by a private company.

We have a counter card for Watney’s ‘Red Barrel’ beer (photographed on both sides here). This would have stood on the bar in the pub and in doing so gently and subconsciously encouraged the punter to buy a pint of Red Barrel. Counter cards are still used, but were once a lot more common, particularly in times when the local shops had their own counter, rather than today when it’s more likely to be a supermarket conveyor belt or self-serve point. Watney’s disappeared in 1991 and we think this counter card is from the 1970s, based on the design used on beer mats from the time.

We feature a porcelain bottle, this one from Emmerson’s brewery of Newcastle – this is what you would have bought your stout in in the late nineteenth century. This particular bottle is probably pre-1890 or so, because it features an ‘ordinary’ bicycle (‘penny farthing’) rather than the ‘safety’ bicycle which largely supplanted it in the 1890s. Emmerson’s used the ‘ordinary’ as their trade mark on another bottle we have, a glass ‘Codd’ bottle, from about the same time, and probably used for a fizzy drink.

Just a taste, then, of what we hold in our collection. Here’s to the next quarter million!