Seen: Vintage Rum Advertisements from the Gallery of Graphic Design

Words by Jesse Serwer—

Mining through the depths of a Google Image search recently, I came across a striking throwback advertisement for Dagger, a long-forgotten Jamaican rum produced by J Wray and Nephew in the 1950s. That discovery led to another: TJS Labs’ Gallery of Graphic Design database, a treasure trove of advertisements from days gone by. Their archives for rum are particularly rich, with ads for Myers’s and Ronrico as well as other long-defunct brands like  Old St. Croix, from the pages of Time, Life, Sports Illustrated and the Saturday Evening Post, spanning the 1930s through to the mid-’60s Mad Men era. The Dagger ad below, it seems, appeared in the April 27, 1959 issue of Sports Illustrated. Scroll down for more visual gold from the GGS archives.