See the fax tampon and the almost identical tampon Nunap sold probably
about the same time, both probably made of Cellucotton, the component of
Kotex.
See other marketing devices: Ad-design
contest for menstrual products in the United
Kingdom; B-ettes tampon counter-display box and
proposal to dealers, with contract; (U.S.A., donated by Procter & Gamble,
2001); "Your Image is Your Fortune!,"
Modess sales-hints booklet for stores, 1967 (U.S.A., donated by Tambrands,
1997)
 
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fax menstrual tampon clip sheet for publications (early-to-mid
1930s, U.S.A.)
Clip sheets enabled people who created newspaper and magazine pages
to cut out ads supplied by companies and paste them onto the make-up pages,
from which plates were made, which in turn printed the pages you held in
your hands. Clip sheets gave companies control over their advertising and
lightened the work of the publications, especially when the advertiser gave
the printer ads made to fit many different column sizes, as you see below.
For most publications computers made clip sheets obsolete.
Why the name fax? (See the tampon and
read more about it.) A woman who
listened to Howard Stern's radio interview with me in 1998 came up with
an intriguing explanation, that it's a kind of acronym for Freedom,
Comfort, Convenience (FCC), words on a fax counter display.
The great Renaissance Italian printer Aldus Manutius invented italic
type and also the small, octavo-size book (possibly the spiritual ancestor
of the pocket book today), which made books more portable. Italic type,
based on Greek handwriting, looks thin and therefore small. I wonder if
the reason fax is always italic and never capitalized is to emphasize
its smallness as compared with the menstrual pads of the 1920s and 1930s
(for example, Modess), fax's main competitors,
which were thick and large, much bigger than today's pads.
One thing that amazes me is the sophistication of the pitch to retailers,
which I once thought had more modern origins. But early Kotex
campaigns showed similar sophistication, showing the mercantile minds
of Wallace Meyer and Albert Lasker, the latter also responsible for naming
Planned Parenthood, for first using the word cancer on the radio and for
being an inspiration behind the National Institutes of Health and the Lasker
Awards in medicine, America's highest.
Finally, look at the words "wear" and "sanitary napkin."
"Wear a pad" probably is more common today than "wear a tampon,"
and I believe the tampon's newness meant that an old vocabulary was necessary
to describe the innovation, just as the words "internal sanitary napkin"
(below) attest to the date of fax; "tampon" appears nowhere
on this sheet, even though it's possible the menstrual tampon derived from
the tampon doctors used for centuries to insert into body orifices to deliver
medication or absorb fluids. But probably few women would have known the
word, or would have had only a medical - disease - association with the
word.
In 1995, a woman who wants to remain anonymous donated the sheet together
with boxes of fax, Fibs, Wix (see early tampons)
and other tampons and advertising material after having read about this
museum in the Chicago Tribune newspaper. Her father, who had worked for
Kotex, left the material, which she found in her mother's belongings after
she died.
Click on the page you want enlarged.
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Side 1
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Side 2
Click on the page you want enlarged.
The two folds on sides 1 and 2 don't line up because I trimmed the the
pictures of the sheets (not the real sheets). Both sides are printed on
coated (heavy and semi-shiny) paper in dark brown ink, with orange added
on the upper right page ("Introducing Profit in Sanitary Napkins").
The sheet measures 10.9" x 25.5" (27.7 x 65.1 cm) and folds into
thirds.
Advertising folks at publications could cut out the ads on side 2; the
ones at the left were designed probably to fit single and double newspaper
columns of the time. Clip sheets were common before computers took over
publications, because ads supplied by companies could be cut out and pasted
into page layouts, then photographed, enabling plates to be made to print
the newspaper or magazine. Small publications probably still do this (2001).
As an art director and graphic designer I had done it both ways.
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©2001 Harry Finley. It is illegal to reproduce or distribute work
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