Complete set of the first ten American Annuals of Advertising Art which began with the 1921, “Catalogue for the First Annual Exhibition of Advertising Paintings and Drawings held by the Art Directors Club…New York…” Subsequent volumes were bound in full cloth or boards with cloth spines, uniformly 8 x 11.5”, varying in length from 128 to 171 numbered pages, plus some 50 unnumbered pages with indices and illustrated ads.
The first volume displayed hundreds of black-and-white text illustrations for products from automobiles to cigarettes, lamps, medicines, razors and soaps. Color endpapers and 35 or more pages of color illustrations, some tipped-in or paste-on, soon became the norm, as well as photography by such masters as Lewis Hine, Edward Steichen and Margaret Bourke White.
Early volumes displayed the work of 80+ artists, many already (or soon to be) famous as painters, poster, book and magazine illustrators – and leading lights of the new Art Deco movement - including MacClelland Barclay, Dean Cornwell, Harvey Dunn, Hugh Ferriss, J.C.Leyendecker, Maxfield Parrish, Edward Penfield, Norman Rockwell, Willy Pogany, Jessie Wilcox Smith, Walter Dorwin Teague, Edward A. Wilson and N.C. Wyeth. Each volume added new names to the commercial art constellation such as Guy Arnoux, Edouard Benito, T.M. Cleland, Gustav Jensen, Charles Livingston Bull, Coles Phillips, Arthur Rackham, Bruce Rogers, Tony Sarg, Hugo Gellert, Gluyas Williams, Rockwell Kent, John Held, William Rienecke, E.A.Georgi, Peter Arno, Lucian Bernhard, James Daugherty, R. Ruzicka, Katharine Sturges, Bernard Boutet de Monvel, Miguel Covarrubias, Edmund Dulac, Arthur Keller, Bruce Rogers and Reginald Birch. Many of their illustrations are masterpieces of the Art Deco genre.