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NLA News cover On the cover this month

Unknown artist
Pure Mercolized Wax (detail)
Advertisement, reproduced from Home, 1 January 1926
(Sydney: Art in Australia, 1920–1942)
Newspaper and Microform Collection

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw an eruption of advertising across an ever-increasing number of popular journals and newspapers. With it, came an increasing use of the female form to advertise a growing array of commodities, ranging from women’s products and clothing through to automobiles or hardware. Some of the products themselves, as in the case of the mercury-containing 'mercolized wax' beauty product touted above, were toxic. Read more...

December 2007 Volume XVIII Number 3

Anyone for seed cake?

Touching on the Library’s latest publication, Colin Bannerman muses on what is fashionable to eat—and what is not

Tale of a Theatre Playbill

Sylvia Marchant tells how Australia’s earliest printed document recently came into the National Library’s Collection

Power to Sell: Women and the Aesthetics of the Commodity Culture

Gwen Rankin examines the female form in advertisements, as revealed in the Library’s Newspapers Collection

Westall’s New Botanical Drawings

With the recent surfacing of 19 Westall artworks, Richard Westall considers the relationship of William Westall and Ferdinand Bauer

Several Early Maps to Our North

Col Simpson investigates the mapping of north Sumatra in the Maps Collection

Friends

A regular news page about the activities of the Friends of the National Library of Australia

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