Even though I’ve never watched a single minute of “Mad Men” (despite the fact that Alison Brie is very high on the list of my favorite future ex-wives), I know that I like the setting: the world of big-time marketing in the early 1960s. Back then, tastemakers didn’t have to worry about drawing the ire of the people who just sit around waiting to feel offended or insulted because, frankly, they didn’t exist yet. As a result, thinly-veiled misogyny, tobacco usage and other things that have fallen out of favor over the years was quite commonplace in the ad world. But perhaps the biggest difference about marketing in that simpler time was the fact that many companies preferred to use illustrations rather than photographs in their print advertisements. Car companies were especially fond of hand-drawn artwork.

What if I was to tell you that somewhere, in the vast expanse of teh Interwebz, there was a magical site where advertising art from the 1930s to the 1960s – most of it from the automotive realm – was on display for all to see? What if I told you that this site also let you order prints of some of this artwork? Or that it had a gallery dedicated solely to station wagons? Would you high-tail it over to that site without finishing this article? Of course you would. Wait, why am I still typing if everyone stopped reading?
Plan59.com
Hat tip to Josh!