| Title |
Ford Cars on Credit at Century of Progress 1934 |
| Category |
| Booklet, gallery |
| Date |
|
1934 |
| Why It's Interesting |
|
The attractive design of this cover wraps around the booklet. This was issued by the Universal Credit Company at the Ford Exposition of the Century of Progress exposition in Chicago in 1934 [the second year of that fair]. Visitors were invited to “purchase your Ford car on UCC Plans.” The text stated that “3 out of every 5 purchases of all makes of cars are made on a convenient budget or time payment basis.” Thanks to this “buying out of income,” “factories can build three times as many cars as would be possible if all sales were restricted to cash transactions.” A caption called this “A Contribution to the Social Progress of the Nation.” Plans would be tailored to customers’ kinds of income. Nearly 2,000,000 customers of Ford had used UCC. |
This website seeks to encourage researchers and collectors to discover and study obscure ephemera that document American culture and life. Worldcat reveals that most of the items that I post cannot be found in more than a few research libraries–often none at all. Alternately, research libraries do not bother to catalog ephemeral publications like these. I believe, however, that because these were distributed free, or at nominal cost, to consumers, they were the publications most likely to make their way into homes and be read by large numbers of Americans.
I acquire pre-1960 examples of the kinds of publications that prove so useful when scholars study 19th-Century America. The limited competition that I encounter for them suggests that libraries, which could easily outbid me, have little interest in post-Civil War and 20th-century ephemeral publications in general.
I try to anticipate what materials future historians will find useful. Being an historian first and a collector second, I organized this website to encourage others to do this too—even if this means new competition for me. I am aware that I could be wrong in prizing particular ephemera or even whole classes of ephemera. I may even be wrong to encourage scholars to study obscure ephemeral publications; these may be obscure for good reason.
Ephemerastudies.org will permit me to share with others the information and imagery that I am acquiring, and to benefit from the knowledge, intelligence and experience of other scholars and collectors. Please contact me with your impressions of the site.
