Short Stories" -- Advertising Chamberlain Patent Medicines to American Families

Des Moines, Iowa: Chamberlain Medicine Co, 1905. Very good to near-fine. Minor dust soiling, creasing. In remarkably nice shape.. Two (2) printed booklets of short stories, published to advertise the Chamberlain Medicine Co. of Des Moines. "Take One Free". Nostrums, snake oil remedies, patent medicines and other dubious cure-all products were an important part of the fabric of everyday life in America in the late 19th and early 20th century. Companies would have to compete for the attention of American families by issuing all kinds of flashy cheap literature through the mail and in pharmacies, including everything from magazines and almanacs to poetry and joke books. Note the cover of each of these books, which shows a handsome American father reading aloud to his family, showing the clear target demographic (White, and middle-class). Each of the "short stories" in these collections reads more like a long joke, and they are interspersed with medical advice (i.e. buy Chamberlain medicines). Gender, race/heritage/ethnicity (the Irish and Native Americans in particular serve as the butt of jokes), and class are all fair game for the humor in these books, and it is fascinating to see some of the social dynamics of the time play out in these pages. Each is single vol. (10" by 6.75"), approx. pp. 16, with a couple in-text line-drawn illustrations, in original illus. self wrps. A representative "short story" included on p.14 of one of the booklets titled "Trouble on the Line": "Everybody who has used a telephone knows exactly what is meant by the following description of the way a certain person talked over the wire. The man at one end had become thoroughly exasperated, and asked his friend if he was losing his hearing. His friend was an Irishman, and replied, 'I can hear you all right till you begin to talk, and then I can't understand a word you say'.