Schwinn 1904 Advertisement — We Will Sell You the World for $35.00

WE WILL SELL YOU THE WORLD

For $35.00.

This is no fake. What is the World? It is one of the leading high grade guaranteed bicycles (not made by the trust), made by what is now the largest and oldest cycle makers in Chicago, Arnold, Schwinn & Co.

They also make the ADMIRAL, what we consider the best medium priced bicycle built. $25, ladies’ or men’s. We have handled them here since 1897.

We handle a large line of bicycle repairs and accessories. Bicycle sold for cash or on installment plan.

PINNEY & ROBINSON,

THE GUN STORE

Guns, Bicycles, Cameras. Established 1887 PHONE MAIN 147 Typewriters, Sporting Goods.

40 North Center Street, Phoenix.

[There is no engraving. The advertisement is set entirely in type, its headline in two sizes across the top of the column and the dealer’s name in heavy capitals below a double rule.]

[A single column of dealer advertising from page 4 of the Arizona Republican for 16 January 1904, cropped out of the newspaper page. It is the first Schwinn document in this archive.

This is the advertisement the Ebykr Schwinn article and the Schwinn Timeline both already cite, and until now the site described it without holding it. The article records that a dealer advertisement placed by Pinney & Robinson of Phoenix offered the World at $35 and the Admiral at $25, and sold the World on one argument: not made by the trust. Here is that sheet, dated, transcribed and carrying its own Library of Congress identifier.

The trust is the American Bicycle Company, the combine A. G. Spalding assembled in 1899 out of roughly fifty firms claiming three-quarters of American bicycle sales. It went bankrupt in 1903 after burning through eighty million dollars. Ignaz Schwinn had stayed out of it. What this sheet shows is what that decision was worth in a shop window: five years after the trust formed and a matter of months after it collapsed, a dealer two thousand miles from Chicago put the phrase not made by the trust in his own paid advertising, in parentheses, as the answer to the question of what the World actually was. The refusal had become a selling feature, and a retailer was spending money on it.

Two dates on the sheet are easy to run together and are not the same. Established 1887 belongs to Pinney & Robinson themselves. We have handled them here since 1897 belongs to the Schwinn agency, ten years later. The Library of Congress machine text renders the first of these as 1897 and so collapses the two; both were read off the image at native resolution.

The dealer is a gun store. Guns, Bicycles, Cameras, Typewriters, Sporting Goods, at 40 North Center Street. The archive already holds a Pierce advertisement from 1909 placed by Hauser Bros., proprietors of the Salem Gun Store in Oregon, and the two sheets are five years and one western territory apart. This is simply what the American bicycle trade looked like away from the coasts once the boom had broken: the bicycle was one line among several in a general sporting goods business, not a shop of its own.

Phoenix was still the capital of Arizona Territory when this ran. Statehood was eight years away, and the Alkire Company’s advertisement further down the same page gives its address as Phoenix, A. T.

The same advertisement ran on four consecutive days — 16, 17, 18 and 19 January 1904 — and this record cites the earliest impression held. The four scans were compared and are of equal quality, so the choice is one of date and not of legibility. Earlier impressions may exist in the run and were not surveyed. A second and different Pinney & Robinson advertisement for the same two machines ran that summer and is held separately in this archive.

The transcription follows the sheet, including its own punctuation and its inconsistent treatment of the two model names. The body text was set from the Library of Congress machine OCR and then read line by line against the image at native resolution, which is why this record is marked as machine text checked by eye rather than as transcription.]