Thought piece – a window on advertising archives

ABSTRACT Compared with America, there is a relative paucity of written archival sources for some aspects of the history of retailing and consumption in Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as records of advertising policy and strategy, whereas millions of advertisements and other examples of advertising ephemera have survived. This short article uses window dressing as an example of the necessity to look beyond traditional written archives to a rich array of sources that can help to widen the scope of research, thus contributing to the historiography of advertising and retail history in general.