The Road to Fortune

Mexico: Lotería Nacional Para La Beneficencia Pública, 1938. Very good. Toned with minor rust staining from staples.. A promotional booklet for the 1938 Lotería Nacional Para La Beneficencia Pública (National Lottery of Mexico), published in English. Features an image of a lottery worker (referred to here as "lottery bell boys") gasping in excitement on the front over while reading a winning number. The booklet begins, "A small ball as the one in this illustration may make you rich. When this young handsome boy shouts out loud the number which you hold, evidently the doors of prosperity are wide-open for you". It goes on to outline the public services the lottery funds, including "hospitals, maternity institutions, asylums, etc.", and gives plenty of photos of the lottery balls being drawn from the abacuses. Finishes with this fantastic pitch: "We want you to make us propaganda. Your business will increase, your children and wife will smile and everyone will be happy. There are many thousands of people whom we have made rich and happy". Exaggerated, maybe, but you would have to be pretty hard-hearted to not to feel the public's excitement in photo XI, waiting for the numbers to be read. Single vol. (7.5" by 5.25"), pp. [20], photo-illustrated, stapled in original photo-illus. self wrps. Versions of the lottery were popular in Mexico dating from the 1760s, but became so popular in the 1930s that the Catholic Church developed its own version to promote its doctrine.