Vintage Brochures

Vintage brochures are great to collect because they're colorful, historic, informative, and cost a whole lot less than the actual items and services they were advertising! Just about all brochures are paper documents printed with useful information, but brochures can take many forms. The first is the leaflet, a single sheet of paper that can be folded in a variety of ways. Leaflet folds include the bi-fold, C tri-fold, gate tri-fold, double gate fold, accordion Z-fold, and French fold. Other brochures are really booklets, which are bound, usually with staples, like mini-books. Still others are pamphlets, which are small booklets lacking covers. The information in vintage brochures is as diverse as their formats. Brochures for tractors and other farming and construction equipment serve as advertisements or mini-catalogs describing products available for sale. Other brochures contain operating manuals or product instructions. Same goes with brochures related to motorcycles such as Harleys and luxury sports cars like Lamborghini, Porsche, and Jaguar. Travel brochures might contain ticket prices, timetables, or maps for railways, bus lines, airlines, or cruise ship lines, particularly the popular Matson lines to Hawaii and the South Pacific. The same companies also produced brochures on their entertainment offerings or menus, like a leaflet detailing the meals offered by Fred Harvey on the Santa Fe railway. Souvenir brochures tend to boast about the wonders found at tourist sites, world's fairs, natural wonders, plays, theme parks like Disneyland and Astroworld, or museums like the Ripley's Believe It or Not Odditorium. Other vintage brochures might have been designed to orient a new employ to a company or a new recruit at a military base to the policies and procedures of the organization. Government, medical, and nonprofit organizations have also printed and distributed brochures on how to prepare for or avoid disasters—from nuclear bombs to earthquakes to food poisoning to STD outbreaks.