Advertisment harvesting

      Old magazines are a fantastic source for advertising pages depicting you favorite collectable.  What Coca-Cola collector doesn’t have a few pages filed away.  These ad pages are also great as memorabilia. Remember your first car? Do you have a restored car or are working on one? There is probably an advert out there for it. Old ads are great for the historian too: I’ve even sold to ad agencies old ads that they designed but lost from their archives! Old advertising pages are great for anyone looking for detail info for modeling. What was the trim like on that 50’s car? How were the Pullman bunk curtains fastened on the California Zephyr? You have to remember that if artwork is used instead of a photo, what you see is what the artist/advertiser wants you to see

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     Before you start tearing magazines apart you have to think about the value of the complete magazine. Would you be better off selling it whole or selling a single page? I have found that thanks to eBay (and other internet sales) that there are many more buyers out there. On the flip side, there are more sellers and more similar items too. I’ll leave the decision to you.

    The majority of magazines are bound in two different ways; stapled or glued (and some are both!) Glued pages are the easiest; just sharply fold back the magazine at the page, breaking the glue bond. Techniques for getting an ad page from a stapled magazine depend on the way the magazine is stapled. Most are printed as 2-pages and stapled through the pile through the middle fold. Pry up the legs (always on the middle of the magazine) and pull the staples out from the spine edge. National Geographic magazines (and other thicker magazines) are printed as separate pages, then stacked and stapled from front to back. Usually the covers are then glued on, gluing the pages too. In this case I remove the covers and pry up the staple legs. Cut them off with small side-cutting pliers. Use a small flat screwdriver (or any small flat blade) to slightly pull up the top of the staple on the other side of the magazine. Use the cutters then to cut the staples.  What you have left is the stack of pages with the staple wires going through the paper, none across the pages. Don’t try to pull the staples through as it will gouge or tear the pages. You can now easily peel off the pages over the wire.

 

This photo shows a partially-removed staple. One leg has been pried up straight, the other cut off.

       Hints for ad sellers: Separate you magazines but keep the covers with the advertising pages you want to list until you write up your eBay ad. This way you can tell if it’s a ‘64 or a ‘65 Lincoln ad you have. Remember though, that for automobile ads, most photos in October through December issues are the next year’s model.

I've been selling ads (and other goodies) on eBay for over 4 years and have just over 1800 ads listed so far, a few thousand to list still!   Busybeas advertisments store