Life Magazine – December 2, 1909 (# 1414) – HUGE, AMAZING Christmas issue!!

Description

Cover : This may well be the most beautiful of all the Life magazine covers!  “Between you and me and the lamp post,” a lovely young lady is dropping a gift in the mailbox.  This incredible snowy scene is by the amazing C. Coles Phillips in his fadeout or fade away style.

– MERRY X-MAS LIFE (an extremely thick issue packed with great Christmas holiday content!!)
– Full page color ads for Kranich & Bach Piano (bright yellow), Perrier sparkling table water (with French flag), White Rock Table water (with gorgeous art of topless nymph); Rubberset Shaving Brushes; Pierce Arrow cars (in front of the Library of Columbia University, art by Louis Fancher); Eastman Kodak (with photo of couple looking at travel photo album).
– Lots and lots of smaller car and automobile-related ads!!!
– This issue also had a number of smaller Piano ads … they must have been the IN THING.
– Letters to Santa Claus, delivered by James S. Metcalfe (tongue in cheek).
– General Prosperity  a genuine Christmas Story, with a real moral to it.
– Curious half page ad for Motor Print magazine dedicated to cars and motoring.
– Half page ad for Outing magazine featuring Harry Whitney back from a months long musk ox hunt on Ellesmere Island.
– Full page black and white ads for Baldwin Piano, E. R. Thomas Motor Company (with photo of the new Thomas 6-40 Long Stroke Flyer); Columbus Buggy Company (with Model 6B – five passenger family car); Elmore Manufacturing Company (with the Elmore model 36 and model 46 touring cars); Life magazine (ad for the next issue, touting illustration that will showcase a bunch of the contributors to Life); Prudential insurance; Pond’s extract family remedy  (2Neat suspects that is was composed primarily of alcohol); Chickering Pianos; Truffault-Hartford shock absorbers; Locomobile cars (with a photo of the “30”);
– Full page art or cartoon art by Otto Lang (Santa Claus), Orson Lowell (Cousin from the west encouraging a Widow to send her daughters to the man-heavy mining towns to get married … “Before the train slowed down all three would be engaged.”); F. T. Richards (November); Orson Lowell (Santa Claus from various points of view),
– Two page centerspread art by Charles Dana Gibson, “Life invites some old friends to dinner.”  The savvy viewer will recognize the people from other artworks of C. D. Gibson.
– Quarter page ad for the Savage automatic handgun, as a Christmas present.
– One third page ad for the Iver Johnson revolver handgun, also as a Christmas present.
– And much, much more humor, art, and sarcastic commentary!  So NEAT!