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I’ve spent what amounts to months of my life digging through the Outdoor Life archives. That includes everything from flipping through the crumbling pages of old issues and sifting through terabytes of scanned pages. Usually I’m looking for a particular story or rereading Jack O’Connor and Jim Carmichel columns, but inevitably, I get sidetracked by the incredible illustrated advertisements for everything from Coleman lanterns to lead duck loads. Print magazines were one of the key ways manufacturers reached their customers in the early and middle 1900s in America, and past issues of Outdoor Life were crammed with all kinds of strange and wonderful ads. Old firearm advertisements are, in their own way, just as interesting and revealing about the trends, tastes, and topics that American sportsmen were thinking about at any point in history.
That’s why we want to give vintage gun ads their due. I pulled these old ads from a range of decades, and noticed a few trends. Color ads were few and far between in the early years of Outdoor Life, but gained momentum as the decades wore on. Older ads also contained lots of persuasive written copy, which persisted through much of the middle century and only began to disappear for snappier slogans in the 80s and 90s.
The following gun ads include iconic models, like the Winchester Model 70 or the Browning Auto 5, as well as introductions for the Remington Model 700 and the 1100. There were plenty more I didn’t have time or room to include, but this collection is a good place to start.
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