Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Rawleigh's 1956

Rawleigh's 1956 Almanac & Good Health Guide is a 30+ page booklet showcasing great advertising and product package design from the first half of the 20th century, and below is just a small sampling of some of the many fun illustrations and photography colliding with fantastic color combinations and simple, yet bold typography. I can't speak for their vast array of soup-to-nuts products as I've never used any of them, but Rawleigh is obviously doing something right-- they're still in business today and going strong since 1889!

Find out more about Rawleigh Products by clicking HERE.

9 comments:

Mr. Cavin said...

Wow the two four-panel beauty aids pages are terrific. I would totally hang the background art up on my wall. Honestly, I would probably frame the catalog pages, nifty products and all. But each of those two-colored panels would really shine on its own, too.

Anonymous said...

BOY I LOVES PIE TOO! COOL POST, I HAVE NEVER HEARD OF RALEIGHS PRODUCTS

Mr. Karswell said...

>Wow the two four-panel beauty aids pages are terrific.

Those 2 pages are the centerfold of the catalog, and they were the first thing I saw when I picked this up and flipped it open... so even if the rest of the guide had been worthless I still would've grabbed this just for those ads!

>I HAVE NEVER HEARD OF RALEIGHS PRODUCTS

As mentioned, I've never used a Rawleigh product, but I live half my life at antique malls and constantly see their old collector tins and boxes for sale so I was familiar with them on that level. I love the old fashioned, lush, turn of the century style designs as much as the stuff from the 50's... their art dept has been on the ball for over a hundred years!

Thanks for the comments, I have a few more of these Rawleigh's guides with great ads for later posts, and as with anything I post it just depends on commentor interest.

NEXT: Something naughty!

Mr. Cavin said...

"NEXT: Something naughty!"

Well this commenter is certainly interested in that!

Patricia Koch said...

wow great pictures. shows us the way it used to be. I am a distributor for the Rawleigh products and I can tell you that our product line has shrunk but we still have some great products left :)

Trish
http://www.herbalsunlimited.com

Mr. Karswell said...

Thanks for writing, Trish! I'm sorry it took me 2 years to notice your comment too...

DARIAN ZAM said...

This is amazing! I kind of have a thing for the Rawleigh's brand, as I have fond childhood memories of it, likely because of the packaging design more than the actual product - but this layout work is fabulous. A few months back a salesman's catalogue came up for sale and it had the label or box for every single product in the range at the time pasted into the book. It looked to date from around this time to the early 1960s. Definitely most of the products matched up to mid-1950s items they were marketing at the time. I missed the close of auction and it sold for a paltry twenty dollars. I was pissed! I would have paid WAY more than that for it. i'm intending to get around to a story on the Rawleigh's brand in New Zealand eventually. There was a very similar brand called Watkin's with many eerily reminiscent products. I don't know at this time whether Watkin's also had roots in America or was just Australasian.
Thanks for posting.
http://longwhitekid.wordpress.com/

Mr. Karswell said...

Damn, wish I'd known about the auction now too! Thanks for writing Darian, drop me a line when you get your Watkins post up!

Crafty C said...

it doesn't get much more to the point than "Boy Loves Pie." i can tell you from experience though that Girl Loves Pie too!