Print Advertisements Collections: Introduction

How to Use This Library Guide

The purpose of this guide is to help researchers locate print advertisements across a variety of themes and eras.

The Hartman Center is one of the largest advertising history repositories in the world, with wide-ranging resources documenting the world of advertising, sales and marketing. This includes large and varied collections of printed advertisements ranging from the mid-nineteenth century through the twenty-first century. 

This guide is organized into three separate sections, which you can find with the tabs at the top of the page:

• Print Advertisement Collections Organized by Name: If you want to browse an overview of all our print materials, or know what you are looking for, this is a good place to start. This includes both digital and physical collections. 
• Digital Collections: These collections contain digitized materials that you can access directly online--such as the 7-Up at to the left.
• Advertisements by Era: If you are looking for print material from a particular era, we have organized our collections by century to help you more easily locate relevant material. Some collections are represented multiple times. 
• Major Themes in Advertising: If you are looking for a quick way to get started, we've pulled together some saved searches representing some of the major subjects represented in our collection.

Duke Libraries Catalog
The on-line catalog provides the most comprehensive way of finding items across all of the Duke libraries. Advanced searching is also available, allowing you to limit the returns based upon multiple words or phrases, or even physical location (such as Rubenstein). Suggested terms for searching:

Collection Guides (Formerly "Finding Aids") 
Collection descriptions, listed as Collection Guides, contain collections of personal or corporate records which more fully described than in the catalog, and are key-word searchable. You may search multiple terms simultaneously, such as the ones listed above.

Further questions
For additional information, please contact the Hartman Center Reference Archivist.