The Birth of Mad Men: Ernest Dichter, Psychoanalysis and Consumerism

The Birth of Mad Men: Ernest Dichter, Psychoanalysis and Consumerism

First edition of The Psychology of Everyday Living by Ernest Dichter

First edition of The Psychology of Everyday Living by Ernest Dichter (1947).

Mid twentieth-century America. In a corporate board room, hazy with tobacco smoke and whiskey fumes, a man pitches innovative new advertising ideas.

Soap isn’t just for mundane hygiene issues, it’s associated with sensuality and should be marketed as sexy and refreshing.

Cigarettes aren’t just commodities, they’re rewards for a job well done, or a break from a stressful work day.

Car makers should promote their brands with convertibles because men associate them with freedom and the fantasy of having a mistress, even if they end up buying a sedan when they take their wife back to the dealership.

Mad Men’s Don Draper.

Don Draper, right? Now in its fifth season, Mad Men has reintroduced the American public to the advertising revolution that led companies away from spots extolling their product’s obvious uses to a new style targeting consumers’ unspoken desires. But the instigator of this movement was not a mysterious and dangerously sexy ad executive like Don Draper. He was a much more interesting figure who forever changed American consumerism.

Ernest Dichter (1907–91).

Ernest Dichter was born in Vienna in 1907 and following a severely impoverished childhood was employed in his uncle’s department store. Working as a window dresser, he became interested in marketing and introduced new American ideas into the shop, such as the use of music to soothe customers.

In 1938, following university training in psychology and informal training in psychoanalysis, he moved to New York with his wife and only $100 to his name. Dichter worked for a time with a traditional market-research firm, but in 1939 he sent a letter to six corporations in which he offered his understanding of psychoanalysis as a way to radically improve their marketing strategies. Four responded, and his first contract was for Ivory Soap. Using in-depth consumer interviews, he learned that when shoppers picked a particular brand,

“it wasn’t exactly the smell or price or look or feel of the soap, but all that and something else besides—that is, the gestalt or ‘personality’ of the soap.

This was a big idea. Dichter understood that every product has an image, even a ‘soul’, and is bought not merely for the purpose it serves but for the values it seems to embody. Our possessions are extensions of our own personalities, which serve as a ‘kind of mirror which reflects our own image’. Dichter’s message to advertisers was: figure out the personality of a product, and you will understand how to market it” (The Economist).

Dichter’s belief in good marketing went beyond creating successful ads; it became a total philosophy. Profoundly affected by the turmoil he had experienced as a young man in Europe, he believed that consumerism was the only bulwark against totalitarianism. The public, he argued, must learn to stop feeling guilty. They must accept and fulfill their unconscious desires, or risk falling under the spell of communism or fascism.

In light of this, he wrote his first book for the general public. The Psychology of Everyday Living (BOOK SOLD), published in 1947, was

“designed as an accessible self-help manual to help Americans ‘accept the morality of the good life’… As America entered the 1950s, the decade of heightened commodity fetishism, Dichter offered consumers moral permission to embrace sex and consumption, and forged a philosophy of corporate hedonism, which he thought would make people immune to dangerous totalitarian ideas” (Cabinet Magazine, issue 44, p. 30).

Chapters such as “The Magic of Soap”, “What Bread Means to You”, “How to Be Happy While Cooking”, and “The Psychology of Buying” purported to solve the problems of everyday life, but largely encouraged a positive attitude to consumption by stressing the good feelings associated with a new purchase or the use of a specific commodity.

The book is extensively illustrated, with images that promote consumerism even more blatantly than the text does. A photograph of a woman applying makeup is captioned “Cosmetics provide psychological therapy”, and another of a man trying on a hat reads, “The right kind of hat gives us dignity”.

In chapter after chapter, Dichter posits that consumer products can help us express our individuality, engage with the world in new ways, or simply provide a self-esteem boost:

The chapter on cigarettes argues that those who try to abstain from smoking are wrong to feel guilty about the habit. Dichter writes that,

“Efforts to reduce the amount of smoking signify a willingness to sacrifice pleasure in order to assuage their feeling of guilt… Guilt feelings may cause harmful physical effects not at all caused by the cigarettes used, which may be extremely mild. Such guilt feelings alone may be the real cause of the injurious consequences”.

One of the photographs used in this chapter has a decidedly sexual subtext:

Automobiles, according to Dichter, aren’t simply for running errands or getting to work. They’re about freedom, personal identity, youthful self-assertion, and, of course, sex.

Probably the best illustration is “What is bought depends on what the woman says”:

Though Dichter faced scrutiny from those who were wary of the corporate hold on Americans’ psyches, criticism only seemed to generate more converts. But his method did have faults, and executives in the early 60s began to feel that his ideas were sometimes too strange to be practical. Like Don Draper dismissing the psychoanalyst in the first episode of Mad Men, the director of a Pepsi campaign fired Dichter when he was told that ice shouldn’t be used in advertisements because it reminded consumers of death. At the the same time, the advent of accessible computing meant that firms were able to return to more scientific methods of researching consumer behaviour.  But Dichter remains the most important figure of twentieth-century advertising. Glance at the television or pass a billboard and you’ll recognise that the concepts he pioneered still dominate the advertising that surrounds us.

Resources:

 

Illustrations of Masonry

Illustrations of Masonry

What end can be more noble than the pursuit of virtue? what motive more alluring, than the practice of justice? or what instruction more beneficial, than an accurate elucidation of symbols which tend to improve and embellish the mind? Every thing that strikes the eye, more immediately engages the attention, and imprints on the memory serious and solemn truths. Masons have therefore universally adopted the plan of inculcating the tenets of their order by typical figures and allegorical emblems, to prevent their mysteries from descending within the familiar reach of inattentive and unprepared novices, from whom they might not receive due veneration. – Illustrations of Masonry by William Preston (12th edition, 1812).

A very attractive recent acquisition is this Masonic binding on a copy of the twelfth edition of Illustrations of Masonry by William Preston, a philosophical statement and handbook of the secret society. The binding was executed in 1812, most likely by John Lovejoy who was himself a Mason and one of seven English binders regularly producing this style during the late eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. He can be identified by the tools he used; a similar binding in red morocco can be seen on the Bodleian Library’s website, and one also appears in the Maggs Brothers catalogue Bookbinding in the British Isles (though it was not unusual for binders to share tools, so we can’t be absolutely sure that Lovejoy produced this binding).

Click to enlarge:

Masonic binding by John Lovejoy.

The design on the upper board matches an engraving used in the book, on which Lovejoy must have based his tools:

What’s nice about these bindings is their lack of sophistication. There’s a charming naivety about the tools, as they reflect the styles of a previous era that had by this time filtered down to the middle classes (who were, of course, the primary followers of masonry). I’m particularly fond of the cherub that appears on the lower board:

And these hands holding stonemasons’ tools:

 

The Great Waterless Desert

The Great Waterless Desert

First edition of Lodges in the Wilderness by W. C. Scully (1915).

The beautiful design on the cover of this book, a first edition of Lodges in the Wilderness by W. C. Scully, is not printed on a dust jacket, but applied directly to the cloth binding. While it’s normal for publishers to use colour paints to apply the titles to cloth-bound books, it’s less common to see large multi-colour designs produced in this way, particularly with such delicate tones. It’s even less common for them to remain in pristine condition; normally the pigments are rubbed and chipped off, or show the effects of soiling and sun exposure. This copy, however, is in stunning condition.

The author, William Charles Scully (1855–1943), was a prolific South African writer known for his sympathy with the native people of the region. His first volume of short stories, Kafir Stories (1895) is “probably the earliest collection of short stories written by any white man in which all of the heroes are black men”*. The volume pictured above is the story of a journey across  a “great waterless desert” undertaken by the author during the 1890s when he was Special Magistrate for the Northern Border of the Cape Colony. In an attempt to connect the book with current events of the Boer War, the publisher has tipped-in a small ticket at the title page reading, “General Botha’s army is operating in the neighbourhood of the Great Waterless Desert dealt with in this book. It forms the great problem of the campaign”.

To see more of our books on travel and exploration, click here.

*Marquard, Jean. “W. C. Scully: South African Pioneer”. Institute for the Study of English in Africa. January, 1979.

 

Jewels & Illuminations: Sangorski & Sutcliffe

Jewels & Illuminations: Sangorski & Sutcliffe

 

The volume above, seen housed in its silk and velvet-lined case, represents the peak of twentieth-century book arts.  Sangorski & Sutcliffe was founded in an attic in Bloomsbury in 1901 by two apprentice binders, and in only a few years it had become one of the most important binderies in the world. Francis Sangorski and his partner George Sutcliffe produced exquisite luxury bindings incorporating delicate inlays and onlays, detailed silver and gilt work, and valuable gemstones. The firm is perhaps best remembered for the book known as “The Great Omar“, a copy of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám incorporating 150 individual jewels in its covers, which sank with the Titanic in 1912 only weeks before Sangorski himself died in a drowning accident.

This  copy of A Dream of Fair Women (BOOK SOLD) by Alfred Tennyson was hand-written and illuminated on vellum and finely bound by Sangorski & Sutcliffe sometime between 1905 and 1911. The covers are blue-green morocco with brown and red onlays and exquisite gilt blocking, and feature five garnet and six turquoise cabochons inset into the upper cover. A very handsome example of the illuminations and jeweled bindings for which the firm was famous. As usual, click to enlarge the images.

Turquoise and garnet on the Sangorski & Sutcliffe binding.

Turquoise and garnet on the Sangorski & Sutcliffe binding.

Title page - Dream of fair Women

Title page – Dream of fair Women

Page Dream of fair Women

Page Dream of fair Women

Page Dream of fair Women

Page Dream of fair Women

 

Dream of fair Women

Dream of fair Women

Jeweled binding by Sangorski & Sutcliffe

Jeweled binding by Sangorski & Sutcliffe

 

 

A Practical Guide to Arts & Crafts and Art Nouveau

A Practical Guide to Arts & Crafts and Art Nouveau

Chrysanthemum Art Nouveau pattern.

One of the most visually delightful items to land on my desk recently, is a set of Arts & Crafts magazine is a wonderful record of the Arts & Crafts and Art Nouveau movements and their appeal to amateur artists and craftspeople.

The Arts & Crafts Movement grew from the ideals of William Morris and John Ruskin, who believed that modern industry was detrimental to English life and aesthetics, dehumanizing the production of goods and influencing the Victorian taste for inexpensive yet gaudy decor. Beginning in the 1860s Morris, Ruskin, and their followers advocated the return to skilled craftsmanship and an over-arching aesthetic influenced by traditional styles such as the Gothic. Morris’s interior design firm became famous for its wallpapers, textiles and stained glass, and his Kelmscott Press revived the art of the hand-press by creating masterpieces of book design such as The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer.

Appearing in the 1890s, and in many ways inspired by Morris, Art Nouveau did not have a social reform aspect like that of the Arts & Crafts Movement, but it did advocate a total aesthetic incorporating art, architecture, and interior design. Its proponents were inspired by graceful and curving natural forms, such as the flowing shapes of plants and the iridescent bodies of insects. The two styles were contemporary for a short period, and the Art Nouveau aesthetic meshed well with the Arts & Crafts emphasis on romanticism and hand-production.

Wrapper to the first number, bound in to volume I.

Both movements were also popular with the middle and upper classes, who took to them as hobbyists and semi-professionals (with book binding becoming a particular favourite of artistically-minded women), not unlike the contemporary resurgence of crafting as exemplified by Etsy. It was to capitalize on this trend that Arts & Crafts magazine was founded in 1904. It described itself as “A Monthly Practical Magazine for the Studio, the Workshop, and the Home”, but based on the contents its primary audience was not composed of professionals but middle and upper class people with free time, disposable incomes, and an interest in art but no formal training. It featured practical articles on supplies and tools, instructions for reproducing professional techniques, stylistic advice and patterns, photographs of professional work and museum pieces, announcements of amateur competitions, and general art and exhibition news.

Our set includes all the issues up to April 1906 (the British Library holds issues dated up to August of that year), bound together in four volumes and retaining the original wrappers from some of the issues. It is replete with large photo spreads and detailed instructional diagrams , as well as wonderful  patterns designed for readers to use in their own craft projects. Even better from our perspective, one of the magazine’s regular features was a section on bookbinding by master binders Sangorski & Sutcliffe, written during the most creative period in the firm’s history. Below, a selection of images give a flavour of the magazine’s contents. As usual, click any photo to enlarge.

To learn more about these movements see the following links:

Introduction to the First Number

The Technical Process of Enamelling

Modelling from Life

Casting in Plaster

Casting in Plaster continued

Pyrogravure

Bookbinding by Sangorski & Sutcliffe

Bookbinding by Sangorski & Sutcliffe

Example of a Sangorski & Sutcliffe Binding

Art Nouveau Bookbinding Pattern

Art Nouveau Patterns

Arts & Crafts Style Patterns

Art Nouveau Casket Design

Arts & Crafts Wood Carvings

Examples of Historic Furniture Designs

Art Nouveau Jewelery

Our bound set of Arts & Crafts magazine.