Triumph or Trial

THE COVER FOR Signs of the Times’ June 1908 issue features the typical photographic portrait of an advertising man — Robert Frothingham, advertising manager of Everybody’s Magazine, a New York-based literary magazine — superimposed on a hand-drawn illustration that suggests a narrative rather than abstract decorations. The illustration is of a Greek or Roman hero, laurel-crowned, rolling the globe up toward a mountain temple. Whether this represents victorious domination or a Sisyphean ordeal, and whether this has anything to do with Frothingham, remain unanswered questions. See complete issues of Signs of the Times dating from 1906 to 1923 at signsofthetimes.com/archive.

• Unusual Inclusion
  A feature profiles Cora Dow (“Dow, the Druggist”), at the time the most successful and largest-advertising businesswoman in Ohio. Taking charge of her father’s Fifth Street Store after he had fallen sick, Dow became a pioneer rate-cutter in Cincinnati and declared independence from all price-control associations, weathering boycotts and annoyed wholesalers. She opened eight more stores, acquired an ice cream factory and a warehouse, always making sure that her business was attractive to women. Though written by a woman about a woman, the article was printed with photos of two men from another story on a different page.