Diario La Nación
- Groceries and Liquors
- For Ladies
- Miscellaneous
This page of La Nación of Santiago for 25 October 1926 carried no news, only a large store advertisement split into boxes by type of goods. The groceries-and-liquors box offered pâté de foie, apple and pear marmalade, mussels, petit-pois, Santa Vittoria liqueur and Cinzano bitter. The box for ladies listed handkerchiefs, needle books, pins, celluloid hairpins, lace, braid, ribbons, ornamental combs and a cream for footwear. The miscellaneous box offered writing pads, envelopes, Lyra pencils, fountain pens, small paint palettes, glue, blotting paper and drinking straws. The page sold these goods as part of a 'Gran Semana del Peso' (Great Peso Week) sale.
This reading covers three boxes of a full-page store advertisement: groceries and liquors, items for ladies, and miscellaneous stationery and household goods. It leaves out the gentlemen's box, whose right column is only partly legible, along with the illustrations and the strips of the facing page visible in the margin. [?] marks words that could not be read. The 'TRENCILLAS de seda' item in the ladies' box is omitted because the end of the word is unclear. 'BIOCK' in the miscellaneous box is read as 'block' and rendered as 'pads'. The page carries no news text.
Translation
Groceries and Liquors
PÂTÉ DE FOIE
MARMALADE of apples, pears, etc.
NATURAL-PACK MUSSELS
PETIT-POIS
SANTA VITTORIA LIQUEUR
CINZANO BITTER
For Ladies
HANDKERCHIEFS
NEEDLE BOOKS with needles
PINS
BOXES of hairpins
CELLULOID HAIRPINS
PIECES OF LACE
BRAID TRIMMINGS
RIBBONS OF [?]
ORNAMENTAL COMBS
CREAM " [?] footwear
MISCELLANEOUS
Miscellaneous
"RECLAME" PADS
ENVELOPES for letters
"LYRA" PENCILS
FOUNTAIN PENS
Small paint PALETTES
BOTTLES OF GLUE
BLOTTING PAPER
STRAWS for drinking soft drinks
Context
The paper that carried the advertisement: Eliodoro Yáñez's La Nación
The advertisement ran in La Nación of Santiago, a daily founded on 14 January 1917 by a group of Liberal parliamentarians led by Eliodoro Yáñez. Chile's national digital library counts it among the papers that promoted a new model of journalism, in which information outweighed open political propaganda. A page filled entirely with one retailer's list of groceries, haberdashery and stationery suits that commercial, mass-readership model. Yáñez had become the paper's sole owner in 1924, so in October 1926 La Nación was still a privately owned, independent daily. That did not last long: in 1927 the dictatorship of Carlos Ibáñez del Campo expropriated the paper and made it the official organ of the Chilean state.
What a peso stood for in October 1926
The page promoted its goods through a sale week named after the peso, and that peso had only just been placed on a new footing. Before 1925 inflation and depreciation were recurring problems for the Chilean currency. In 1925 the government of Arturo Alessandri passed three fundamental economic laws that adopted the gold standard and created the Central Bank, both measures recommended by the American economist Edwin Kemmerer. Under the new system the peso had to equal a specific quantity of gold; the currency stabilized and the issue of money was capped. Memoria Chilena reports that between 1925 and 1929, while Kemmerer's doctrine prevailed, money issue and inflation were very low. A Santiago store in 1926 was therefore building its promotion around a currency unit that had become notably steadier than it had been a few years earlier.
Why a store still sold bricks for cleaning knives
Outside the three boxes translated here, the same advertisement offered 'ladrillos para limpiar cuchillos', bricks for cleaning knives, an item that shows how table knives were cared for at the time. Steel cutlery in the Sheffield tradition was made of ordinary carbon steel, which oxidized in damp or oxygen-rich conditions and rusted unless it was polished frequently. One such abrasive brick was the English bath brick, patented in 1823 by William Champion and John Browne and a forerunner of the scouring pad; knives could be polished directly on a wetted brick. Harry Brearley's rustless, or stainless, steel eventually gave households sturdy and hygienic tableware, but his suggestion to use it for dining and cooking tools was at first not taken seriously. The advertisement shows that in Santiago in 1926 knife-scouring bricks were still an ordinary household article, sold alongside pins and envelopes.
Original
Comestibles y Licores
PATE DE FOIE MERMELADA de manzanas, peras, etc. CHORITOS AL NATURAL PETIT-POIS LICOR SANTA VITTORIA BITTER CINZANO
Para Señoras
PAÑUELOS CARTERAS con agujas ALFILERES CAJAS con horquillas HORQUILLAS de celuloide. PIEZAS DE ENCAJE GALONES de TRENCILLAS CINTAS DE [?] PEINETAS CREMA " [?] calzado VARIOS
VARIOS
BIOCK " RECLAME " SOBRES para cartas. LAPICES " LYRA " PLUMAS FUENTE PALETITAS Pintura FRASCOS DE GOMA PAPEL SECANTE CAÑITAS para tomar refrescos
Source: Source: Internet Archive