Thank you for being here. Back in the early 2000s, I owned an IT services company that was the former tech department of a dot-com called Lineup — a kind of proto-YouTube aggregation site for early streaming content. Great idea except no one had broadband yet, so when it collapsed, I took the smartest guys and started taking care of Macs and Exchange servers at movie production companies, investment banks and the like around West Los Angeles. 

It was during this time a friend referred me to an east coast auction house looking for someone to produce their auction catalogs — from photography to finished book. Easy work, I took it on and photographed dozens of sales over the next number of years. The house specialized in old advertising, “country store” items, vintage toys and just about anything people collected at the time. One big category I shot was beer and liquor advertising items, primarily from regional brewers in New England, and it was readily apparent that this 20th century era of marketing was one of the most creative, unique and largely now forgotten periods in American history. Ironically, this heyday of American advertising ingenuity was split in half by the national psychosis that was the National Prohibition (Volstead) Act. It lead to the ratification of the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution, prohibiting the manufacture and distribution of alcohol in the United States, and ran from January 1920 until December 1933, when the 21st Amendment (repeal) was ratified by Utah, returning control of alcohol laws to the states and their individual counties. 

What you’ll see on the following pages is a tangible, living collection of how mostly Gerrman immigrants grew from humble beginnings to regional brewing powers, using the new technologies of chromolithography and lithographic printing on metal to create some of the 20th century’s most enduring advertising icons. — Jim Bunte