I received a 1000 or so sheets of separated large-format magazine ads from the Roaring Twenties this weekend. I’m guessing somebody took a stab at being a harvester but abandoned it after not immediately becoming a millionaire at it. Got ‘em cheap. Flipping through them, I’m seeing that it was a very bad decade to have freckles. And I just now realized we are living in the Twenties and that feels very weird.

A little side note: I am not a harvester, but I have taken advantage of opportunities like this one. I also have several boxes of harvested ads from a local, short-lived antique shop that bought the inventory of a Fargo antique shop and moved it all to Bismarck. I also have a box of clippings I picked up for a song at another closing shop where the owner abandoned an overambitious scrapbooking project. I like my magazines intact, or at least, as intact as possible because of their age and individual journeys.

And on the rare occasion, I will pick up an individual ad if I can’t track down its magazine source, its magazine is too $$$$, or it’s just too spiffy for me to let it slip through my fingers.