This hefty and beautiful scrapbook is a visual record of a century of advertising, of the travel industry and, through those prisms, of the twentieth century itself. It was, of course, an American Century, and this book has an unashamedly American look. The cover could be a still from (or more likely a reference for) Mad Men — the recent TV serial recreating the lives of 1960s New York admen in a palette that seems derived from the ads of that era.
Those of you who grew up in the 1960s or early 1970s may recall the peculiar — and lost — glamour of the international airlines and hotel chains of those decades. Part of the charm of this book is that such personal nostalgia is both indulged and contextualised by earlier locutions of cosmopolitanism and style.
So we see the jet set preceded by cruise liners, streamlined trains, and even the sometime éclat of Greyhound buses. It’s not a polemical book by any means, and the production values are entirely and appropriately hedonistic. But it takes you many places, from the almost comical sexism with which stewardesses are fetishised in the 1940s (this turns into a winking but no less sexist irony by the 1970s) to the perennial dilemma of volume and value, exclusive luxury and mass-tourism that drives a schizophrenic industry.
Finally, this book is also a place to wallow in the history of print advertising graphics, that canny and naïve art form of the twentieth century, which may well be in its final hours.