Grocery ads in Oxnard Press-Courier
The May 1, 1958 issue of the Oxnard Press-Courier includes these ads for four supermarkets in Ventura County, California. The ads use many of the same fonts, suggesting they were produced at the same printer, probably the newspaper itself. This was common practice in the pre-digital era, especially for small businesses in small towns.
I salute the anonymous typesetter(s) at work here. They employ a variety of low-fi methods for grabbing attention and organizing information. Note the liberal use of rules and squiggly borders, the giant ‘1’ for Big T and Asahi Markets, the huge size contrast between numbers and units (lbs, cans, bunches), and the bursts for the Oxnard Produce Market.
Some of the typefaces used throughout the newspaper (and these ads) are Franklin Gothic Condensed, Metro No. 2, and Erbar-Grotesk Bold Condensed. Tempo, a very common choice for mid-century American newspapers, appears in the La Perla ad (e.g. “EGGS”). The largest type, used for many of the figures, is likely wood type and difficult to identify. Hamilton’s Plain Gothic No. 6243 appears to be one of them.
