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2 Comments

culture

Vintage Toronto Ads: Are You a High-Brow?

1920s humour magazine Goblin wanted to know!

By

Source: Goblin, February 1926.

Clearly, if this contest were held by a Toronto-based magazine today, the question wouldn’t be “are you a high-brow?” but “are you a member of the downtown elite?” Meanwhile, instead of corned beef and cabbage (which would likely receive a high-brow spin at a restaurant these days), the low-brows would ponder their pot shots over a stereotyped meal of big chain fast food chased down with a double-double.

Note the trick designed to entice more people to subscribe to the humour stylings of Goblin: better prizes to those who received the magazine in their mailbox each month. Those subscriptions only helped so much though: Goblin wound up being strictly a creature of the 1920s. Despite a fine roster of artistic and literary talent, including Greg Clark, Jimmie Frise, Stephen Leacock, Leslie McFarlane, Lou Skuce, and Richard Taylor, the magazine only existed from 1921 to 1929.

And here are the winning entries…

Source: Goblin, March 1926.

Comments

  • http://twitter.com/yytnim mintyy

    I think the 21st century Toronto equivalent would be “Are you a Hipster?”

    Seeing as how diluted the term has become, maybe an exploration of the over-used derogate could shed some light on what the hell it means anymore.

  • David Toronto

    Could someone at Torontoist.com please enlarge the
    ads and their text? Even at 200% enlargement it’s still
    muddled and hard to read.