Diario La Nación
- EVERYONE
- IN THE TIE DEPARTMENT:
- IN THE SHIRT DEPARTMENT:
On 24 October 1926 the front page of Santiago's La Nación was taken up by a large retail advertisement. Its banner promised that everyone would be amazed by "colossal" bargains on thousands of quality articles. Price lists followed, arranged by department. The tie department offered knitted silk ties in newly created patterns and colors, and "Bakelith" cigarette holders for gentlemen. The shirt department offered hinged studs for soft collars and practical Oxford collars. Every item quoted was priced at $1.00. The excerpts read here do not name the store.
This is a partial reading of three excerpts from the front-page advertisement. The heading TODO EL MUNDO is split across several image tiles. In the lower price lists, text near the column breaks and the right-hand edge is cut off, and some words are faint. The OCR was badly garbled, so the excerpts were transcribed from the page image. The reading does not cover the rest of the price lists and does not identify the advertiser.
Translation
EVERYONE
WILL BE AMAZED AT THESE COLOSSAL BARGAINS!! We are talking about thousands of quality articles
IN THE TIE DEPARTMENT:
A HUGE assortment of knitted silk ties, in newly created patterns and colors, at $1.00. AN INTERESTING stock of "Bakelith" cigarette holders for gentlemen, a very striking article, at $1.00
IN THE SHIRT DEPARTMENT:
HINGED studs for soft collars, at $1.00. OXFORD collars, practical model, at $1.00
Context
La Nación's owners and outlook in 1926
La Nación was founded on 14 January 1917 by a group of Liberal parliamentarians led by Eliodoro Yáñez. Chile's national library portal, Memoria Chilena, counts it among the papers that promoted a new model of journalism, in which news reporting outweighed open political advocacy or party propaganda. In October 1926, when this page appeared, the paper was still privately owned. In 1927 it became the official organ of the Chilean state after the dictatorship of Carlos Ibáñez del Campo expropriated it. This full-page store advertisement therefore ran in the final stretch of La Nación's years as an independent commercial daily.
Front-page advertising in the Chilean press
According to Memoria Chilena, newspaper advertisements in Chile through the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth were mostly text set into the vertical columns. The same portal's image collection includes advertisements on the front page of El Mercurio in 1906, so selling space on a daily's front page was not new by 1926. Memoria Chilena attributes the growth of advertising to the development of industries and specialized commercial houses, which produced ever fiercer competition. The La Nación page shows that more developed form: a banner line to draw readers in, followed by goods and prices listed department by department instead of a few lines of text in a column.
Gath & Chaves and Santiago's department stores
The department-by-department layout, with separate tie and shirt counters, points to a large store with a full menswear section. One store of that kind in Santiago was Gath & Chaves, a Buenos Aires firm that opened a branch in the city in September 1910. Harrods later also took over its Chilean subsidiary, which ran stores in Santiago, Valparaíso, Temuco and Valdivia. Memoria Chilena's advertising collection includes a Gath y Chaves notice for a "great February clearance", which shows that the firm advertised a big seasonal sale in the Chilean press. The excerpts translated here do not carry the advertiser's name, however, so they do not by themselves establish which store paid for this page.
A peso newly tied to gold
Every price in these excerpts is the same: $1.00, the dollar sign standing for the Chilean peso. That peso had just been reorganized. In 1925, under President Arturo Alessandri, Chile passed three key economic laws. The first made the gold standard the country's monetary unit, the second created a Central Bank to issue convertible banknotes, and the third regulated banking. A team of foreign experts known as the Kemmerer Mission endorsed the legislation, and the system worked until the Great Depression. The one-peso prices on this page were therefore quoted in a currency that had been convertible into gold for about a year. The sources used here give no exchange rate or wage figures, so they cannot show how cheap one peso was for a Santiago shopper.
Bakelite cigarette holders as a novelty
Bakelite, the first plastic made from synthetic components, was developed by the chemist Leo Baekeland in Yonkers, New York, in 1907 and patented on 7 December 1909. During the 1910s and 1920s the Bakelite Company also produced a "transparent" cast resin without filler for a small market, and blocks or rods of it were machined and carved into pipe stems, cigarette holders and jewelry. The advertisement's "Bakelith" cigarette holder, spelled that way on the page and praised as a very striking article, belongs to this line of smokers' goods. In 1926 the advertiser presented a synthetic-material accessory for gentlemen at the same one-peso price as ties and collar studs.
Original
TODO EL MUNDO
QUEDARA ASOMBRADO ANTE ESTAS COLOSALES OFERTAS!! Se trata de millares de artículos de calidad
EN CORBATERIA:
UN ENORME surtido de corbatas tejidas, de seda, en dibujos y colores de reciente creación, a $ 1. 00 INTERESANTE stock de boquilla " Bakelith ", para caballeros, artículo de gran efecto, a $ 1. 00
EN CAMISERIA:
BROCHES articulados para cuello blando, a $ 1. 00 CUELLOS de oxford, modelo práctico, a $ 1. 00
Source: Source: Internet Archive