History of Advertising Libraries

Looking Back-- The History of Advertising Libraries and Agency Libraries by Ed Strable

(Reprinted from the SLA Advertising & Marketing Division Bulletins, Fall 1986 – Winter 1988)

Advertising Libraries Prior to 1920

If you study the history of advertising, you surely will conclude that the advertising agency library grew out of a generalized movement toward specialized services in agencies. A milestone was reached in advertising when the agency adopted research as a necessary function; and it was as a result of the research function that the agency library became a necessity.

Before 1910 there were no agency libraries, and probably no advertising libraries, as we know them today although collections of books and magazines had begun to exist in a small way due to the tremendous amount of advertising literature that had been produced between 1890 and 1910. There is no record of the existence of an organized advertising library when special librarians formed their association in 1910, although some business libraries (e.g. Price Waterhouse, the AT&T accounting library) had been established.

The library of the J. Walter Thompson Company is often cited as the first agency library, coming into being in 1918. But there are strong indications that an Indianapolis agency had a library in 1916 or earlier. In the April, 1916 issue of Special Libraries Merle Sidener (he? she?) of the Sidener-Van Riper Agency reports:

The Associated Advertising Clubs of the World, with headquarters in Indianapolis, maintains in its office a model business library…

While our library is not so complete as that, we are enabled to have placed upon the desk of any of our principals, all of the references in books and magazines, published in the last five years or so, bearing on a specific problem. For instance the librarian was asked to bring references to chewing gum advertisers and among them were these…Besides these, there were a score of index cards submitted for selection, bearing on methods of distribution necessary for a product such as chewing gum.

Printer’s Ink, Advertising and Selling, and System Magazine are indexed and cross indexed as the current newspapers arrive, and the magazines are bound as each volume is completed.

Sounds like yesterday, doesn’t it? It certainly does appear that an organized advertising agency library, presided over by a librarian, had appeared in the United States by 1916.

It also seems likely that the aforementioned Associated Advertising Clubs of the World could have had some effect on the development of advertising libraries during and after this period since it was also in 1916 that John Cotton Dana – our John Cotton Dana, first president of SLA and one of its founders – was made chairman of the Committee on Libraries of this organization. This committee represented a large field of businesses, advertising clubs and advertising managers, and they hoped to build up indispensable libraries on advertising and related subjects and to promote business interests through library cooperation with the businessman. They probably had something to do with the model business library gathered for the St. Louis National Advertising Convention in 1917, a library which later became the nucleus of the library of the Associated Advertising Clubs and called in 1922 “…the best advertising library in existence.” They probably also influenced the establishment of advertising libraries set up by local associations of advertising men during this period.

As seems to be so often the case, the important movements in library history can be written in terms of one person’s achievements. Certainly no single individual was more closely associated with the development of the advertising agency libraries nor more active in championing their formation than Mary Louise Alexander.

Mary Louise Alexander and Advertising Agency Libraries in the 1920s

No single individual was more closely associated with the first 20 years of development of agency libraries nor more active in championing them than Mary Louise Alexander. She received some library training at the St. Louis Public Library, then moved to New York City and entered special library work, becoming in 1919 the librarian of the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency. About a year later she became affiliated with Barton, Durstine and Osborn where she organized and for 18 years directed its research department, creating one of the largest private business libraries in the country.

She quickly joined the SLA and in May 1921 was reported compiling a list of advertising libraries with the idea of starting an Advertising Group in the SLA – a group for which she had been asked to be chairman before it actually existed. But her efforts brought few such libraries to light. Writing in Special Libraries in September-October issue, 1921 about “Effective Advertising Library Service,” she reported that of the 1,200 or more agencies in the country, with about 250 in New York City alone, only four had been found to have libraries: her own Barton, Durstine and Osborn, the George Batten Company, JWT, and the MacMartin Advertising Agency in Minneapolis.

In each of the relatively small events in the record of the 1920s that tended to focus attention on advertising libraries, Miss Alexander seems to have had some part:

• She was active in forming a group for librarians of commercial libraries in SLA

• She spoke many times on the value of the library to the agency

• Bruce Barton, on eof the top men in Miss Alexander’s agency and an important figure nationally, delivered the banquet address at the 1923 SLA convention

• She chaired numerous groups in the association, became vice-president and then president of the New York Chapter and still later in the 1920s was vice president in the association

At the 1926 convention, still  another important advertising figure, Paul T. Cherington, the Director of Research at JWT, spoke to the group. Other non-library advertising people were induced (probably by MLA) to write about the place of the library in agency research. In the March, 1925 issue of Special Libraries, Percival White, a research engineer, wrote:

Perhaps there is no field served by the special library which it can benefit to a greater extent than the field of market research…

Among the advertising agencies, Barton, Durstine and Osborn, J. Walter Thompson Company, and George Batten Company have applied the lesson, and are profiting as a result. Each of these agencies has a highly efficient librarian in charge, and the work, instead of being spasmodic, is carried on as a smoothly and uninterruptedly as that of a paper mill.

The inevitable result is that the library becomes the mainspring of all the marketing research…

Among the advertising agencies themselves there still is a crying need for good librarians. In the average agency, the waste of fact material is appalling…

The same Percival White, in his book Advertising Research, published in 1927, said: “The growth of special libraries in recent years has been noteworthy and, in many cases, these prove valuable sources for analyses and investigations.” One sentence is not a great deal, but this was probably the first time a book on advertising research recognized the function of the library at all.

Cause and effect? Hard to say. But in May of 1925 a librarian by the name of Wilma Trost was selected by Olson and Enzinger, Inc., an agency in Milwaukee, to act as their research worker. The November 1925 Special Libraries reported that a Miss Jeanette Batted was appointed librarian for Young and Rubicorn (sic), Advertisers, Philadelphia, a firm only two years old “…but the volume of business necessitates a permanent library file.” Early in 1928, Miss Hermione Henze was reported organizing a library for Honig Cooper, Advertising Company and in January 1929, note was made of a library at the H.K. McCann Company (later McCann-Erickson).

Mary Louise Alexander Conquers the Nineteen Thirties

From 1930 on, agency librarians, always closely allied to the research work in the organizations, grew in number, recognition and scope of activity. Mary Louise Alexander in 1930 was able to say that she knew of twelve to fifteen agencies in New York City alone which had organized their own libraries plus several in the Middle West. During the period 1930-1940, news notes in Special Libraries mentioned at least eight new advertising agency librarians in New York, Detroit, Milwaukee and Chicago, but this practice of mentioning new libraries and librarians decreased as the event became more common.

Note that the formation of new advertising agency libraries burgeoned during one of the worst depressions this country had ever experienced. In many respects, it was a one-woman cause and effect. Miss Alexander polished and perfected the technique of writing articles directed at business men, articles which were published in non-library periodicals. One in Advertising and Selling in 1935 (April 25) is a good example of the practical and shrewd publicity she wrote. After citing a survey that “proved” that businessmen need facts which they were not getting, she outlined how a company library could be established inexpensively, how a trained librarian could be obtained, and how the money saved by the library would pay for the  library.

Now get this – she closed by challenging her businessman-reader to test the fact finding ability of his present staff by pressing the proper buzzer on his desk and asking for the answers to seven questions, which she listed. Her punch line was that the answers could be produced by a trained librarian in fifteen minutes from material costing less than five dollars.

During 1932-33 and again in 1933-34, Miss Alexander served two active terms as president of SLA, the first advertising agency librarian to hold the job. This position, as well as other offices she held in other library organizations, focused attention on her talents and had, as well, an indirect effect in calling attention to the profession she so ably represented. She was paid many compliments in the advertising press.

Late in the 1930s she left advertising agency librarianship to conquer new fields. In 1939 she went to Philadelphia to become director of the Bibliographic Committee which, under a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, surveyed the library resources and needs of Philadelphia and developed a plan for a bibliographic center. Then, in November of 1941, she was appointed special assistant to Eleanor Roosevelt in the Office of Civilian Defense in Washington. In February, 1943, she became librarian of the Ferguson Library, Stamford, Connecticut. She became a member of the SLA Hall of Fame in 1966.

The Formation of the SLA National Advertising Group and the Beginning of “What’s New”

During the 1940s, most of the activity among advertising librarians centered about New York City, chiefly due to the fact that more of them were there than in any other single city. Although agencies in many of the large cities established libraries during that period – St. Louis, Cleveland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Kansas City and others boasted one or more agency libraries under the control of professional librarians – the greatest flowering continued in New York City.

Through the SLA, advertising librarians of all types from all over the country had banded together for cooperative activity and interactions. But it was from the Advertising Section of the New York Chapter that the sponsorship came in 1942 for a National Advertising Group to be organized outside the Commerce Group of the association. For more than five years the New York Chapter had had an enthusiastic Advertising Section, numbering 63 members in 1942. When their petition for group status was approved by the SLA Executive Board, one of their advertising agency members, Delphine V. Humphrey of McCann-Erickson, Inc., New York, was made temporary chairman. By the middle of 1943, the Advertising Group had grown to 112 members, but 92 of them (about 82%) were in New York and the rest scattered over the country, with only the Michigan Chapter having a local Advertising Section.

Throughout the rest of the 1940s and into the 1950s, the Advertising Group accomplished a good deal. The group continued a vigorous recruitment campaign and grew to 258 members by 1951. Individuals in the group continued the practice followed by Mary Louise Alexander of publishing articles about advertising library techniques and advances in magazines that reached advertising management. At their convention meetings they were successful in securing and conducting meetings relevant to the needs of all advertising librarians.

Following are selected quotes from an article by Marion Harper, Jr. on “The  Function of Research in Advertising” which appeared in the September, 1945 issue of Special Libraries:

To study and understand the consumer in relation to a specific problem involves research not only by the economist, but also by the psychologist, the sociologist, the statistician and others.

The function of the advertising library in such a setting is of particular importance. In our field the library is, or should be, an integral part of all research activities…The contribution made by the library staff of our own organization has been of great value to the progress and completion of many of our studies. This…is not limited to quick reference work on details. It often involves long range work in the gathering of source materials on a particular problem, and the analysis and interpretation of that material from the point of view of the interests of the many specialists studying the subject.

…the field of advertising is too wide in its interests and problems to confine the librarian’s services within artificially set limits…The efficiency of special librarians in this field should be measured not only by the range of their knowledge of the requirements of advertising but also by the range of their knowledge of the total cultural setting in which advertising operates.

(Forty plus years later, how many of our bosses would describe our function in these terms?)

In the mid-forties, the advertising members of the SLA Illinois Chapter started a monthly list of new publications of interest to its members. It was taken over in 1946 as a project of the National Advertising Group, was named “What’s New in Advertising and Marketing” and concentrated on listing free and inexpensive publications. It had 161 paying subscribers by the early 1950s.

The “Advertising Sources” Course and the Great 1951 AAAA Meeting

In the mid-1940s and early 1950s, our predecessors in the advertising library business took on and accomplished a couple of projects which make our current cooperative efforts look mighty flaccid.

In 1945, the Advertising Section of the New York Chapter prepared and carried through the first of a series of courses on “Advertising Sources” for the purpose of training sub-professional assistants who worked in advertising libraries. Delphine Humphrey, describing the course in Special Libraries (September, 1945), explained that advertising libraries were suffering from an acute shortage of experienced assistants due to the war and also to “…the ever increasing importance of advertising research and the rapid expansion of special libraries in the advertising field.” The librarians pooled their talents for the in-service training course and presented 10 sessions, each held in the library of the instructor. Reference tools, government sources, studies, services, picture collections and other subjects were covered. And this was not a one time thing. In somewhat the same form, the course was given for many years thereafter. (It is my recollection that it was taken over, eventually, by the advertising agency librarians, who had formed a council to work together on such projects.)

In 1951, advertising agency libraries and librarians received recognition which is without precedent in this particular field of special librarianship and is even quite unusual in any area of special librarianship. On October 31 of that year, an entire session was devoted to the advertising agency library at the Eastern Annual Conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies held at the Hotel Roosevelt in New York City. As Delphine Humphrey, chairman of the planning committee for this meeting put it, with this meeting “…the advertising agency library really came of age and was recognized as an important part of the agency…” (Special Libraries, January, 1952)

Miss Humphrey was asked to plan this meeting in May of 1951. She and her planning committee of eight other New York area agency librarians lined up a panel of speakers consisting of outstanding agency executives, one to represent each department which uses the library most frequently, and an agency librarian to outline the development of the agency library.

The January 1952 issue of Special Libraries, devoted almost entirely to reprinting the seven speeches given at the session, also congratulated the group for their fine use of this excellent opportunity to promote advertising libraries. The meeting also received top billing with a picture of the speakers and chairman in the December, 1951 issue of Advertising Agency and the AAAA provided transcripts of the talks to its members.

This event can serve as an appropriate finale to this little review of the early history of advertising, principally advertising agency, libraries – and it also came at the end of my period of research. I hope it has been of some interest to readers of the bulletin. But, more to the point, doesn’t someone out there want to adopt Mary Louise Alexander and/or Delphine Humphrey as role models?