Author: Smoca advertising. Kataoka Toshiro etc.
Title: [Smoca Kokoku Sakuhinshu Daigoshu].
Description: Osaka, Sumokasha 1937 (Showa 12). 22x15cm publisher's printed red wrapper; [8],176pp, illustrated throughout including two mounted colour plates. Minor signs of use and some browning; quite good. ¶ The fifth of Smoca's compilations of their advertising, seven appeared between 1928 and 1941. Smoca's success - they are still going - was through clever advertising. From the start, in 1925, the company's founder, advertising man Kataoka Toshiro, hired the best artists and cartoonists.The colour illustrations are two of Smoca's series of face and teeth posters - about the last and probably the two dullest after the weird and sometimes disturbing series issued over the previous decade.Smoca, in case you wondered, was then a tooth powder for smokers.

Keywords: graphic art advertising c20th Japan Asia modernism cosmetics tobacco humourmeiji