Schwinn 1947 Advertisement — Extra Special Christmas with a Genuine Schwinn-Built Bicycle

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YOU’LL HAVE AN Extra Special Christmas —

WITH A GENUINE Schwinn-Built Bicycle

Look For This Seal . . . It’s Your PROOF OF QUALITY

SHOW DAD THE BIKE YOU WANT FOR CHRISTMAS!

BEFORE you buy a bicycle, stop and see Schwinn-Built Bicycles with their exclusive features found in no other bicycle! Find your nearest Schwinn dealer in your classified telephone book. He is waiting to show you a smooth, streamlined Schwinn Bicycle with Automobile Type Expander Brakes, Knee-action Spring Fork, Built-in Fenderlight, patented parking stand and many other special features . . . PLUS the famous Schwinn Guarantee. Take Dad along to see the bike you want for Christmas.

Ride the Bike the Movie Stars Ride

DON’T BUY JUST ANY BICYCLE — INSIST ON A “SCHWINN” — AMERICA’S FINEST BICYCLE

© 1947 ARNOLD, SCHWINN & CO.

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[The advertisement runs the full width of the sheet and is ruled off top and bottom, with the word Advertisement set small at each upper corner. Two machines are drawn in three-quarter view facing left, both balloon-tired, both carrying the Schwinn script on the tank or the chainguard. The left-hand machine is a step-through model with a rear carrier over the mudguard. The right-hand machine is a diamond frame with a tank between the top tubes and a headlamp faired into the mudguard. Between and above them the words Schwinn-Built Bicycle are reversed white out of a black tag shape drawn as a swing ticket, with its string looping back over the left-hand machine. At the far left is the Schwinn seal, a circular badge with the name across a shield. At the right a small figure of Santa Claus carries a sack and speaks the line about showing Dad the bike. The body copy sits in three columns along the foot, the closing line in heavy capitals across the bottom, and the maker’s copyright line is set very small beneath the left-hand machine.]

[One advertisement cropped out of page 204 of the Washington Sunday Star for 7 December 1947. It is the third Schwinn document in this archive and the first that the company placed itself.

The two Schwinn sheets already held are dealer advertising from 1904, bought and worded by Pinney & Robinson of Phoenix. This one is national advertising, set by the manufacturer, and it carries the copyright line of Arnold, Schwinn & Co. of Chicago at the foot. Forty-three years separate it from them, and in that time the argument has turned completely around. In 1904 a retailer two thousand miles from Chicago sold the World by telling his customers what it was not — not made by the trust — because the maker was not a name anybody in Phoenix would have known. In 1947 the maker does not explain who it is at all. It asserts a standard, AMERICA’S FINEST BICYCLE, and spends the rest of the space telling the reader how to find a dealer.

That instruction is the most informative line on the sheet: Find your nearest Schwinn dealer in your classified telephone book. Schwinn under Frank W. Schwinn had spent the 1930s and 1940s moving its business away from mail order and the department and hardware stores that sold bicycles under their own names, and toward a network of franchised dealers who sold the Schwinn name itself. The seal at the left, captioned Look For This Seal . . . It’s Your PROOF OF QUALITY, and the compound Schwinn-Built used three times in the copy, are both instruments of that policy. A bicycle built by Schwinn and badged as something else could not carry either.

The features named are the ones the company was selling in the period and every one of them is a specification rather than a claim: Automobile Type Expander Brakes, Knee-action Spring Fork, Built-in Fenderlight, and a patented parking stand, which is the built-in kickstand. The famous Schwinn Guarantee is invoked but not stated, and a Juneau dealer’s advertisement two years later calls the same thing a Lifetime Guarantee.

The placement is deliberate and is part of the document. The advertisement occupies the bottom third of a Sunday comics page, directly beneath the strips Life’s Like That by Fred Neher and Bobby Sox by Marty Links. The copy is addressed to a child throughout — show Dad the bike you want, take Dad along — and it was placed where children would be reading. The line Ride the Bike the Movie Stars Ride sits in the same register.

A note on the title. The Library of Congress catalogs this issue as the Evening star, which is the paper’s name for six days of the week, but the masthead over this page reads THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C., DECEMBER 7, 1947. Both are correct and the provenance pair keeps the Library of Congress form.

The whole newspaper page is never the document here. The advertisement was cropped from the Library of Congress IIIF master at native resolution and the page identifier is kept in the provenance pair. The body text was set from the Library of Congress machine text and then read against the image at native resolution, which is why this record is marked as machine text checked by eye rather than as transcription.]