France in the ’20s and ’30s was famous for its typographic and pictorial publicity—advertisements—that were ubiquitous and used as many “platforms” as possible. I’ve written about French advertising fans, bar mats, calendar books and so much ephemera that it fills up dozens of boxes in my attic.
Thanks to David Cohn, an ephemera specialist with a taste for French Deco, I have a collection of bookmarks. As fans were not limited to a single industry or business, bookmarks like these advertised a wide variety of businesses from (not surprisingly) bookshops to couturiers, furniture emporiums and les grands magasins.
Some are mundane, others are ambitious die-cuts. All show the ingenuity of marketeers to get customers into their shops to purchase their wares.
