In November, 1944, wartime shortages of paper and printer's ink necessitated a major change in the appearance and the content of the El Mundo Dance Guide. The poor-quality newsprint available in this period did not have sufficient opacity for the Guide's densely printed layout. As a result, the ink tended to bleed through to the verso page. [Article continues below the appeal...]
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In early November 1944 (above left), the Dance Guide was composed in a variety of large, bold, eye-catching type in both serif and sans-serif fonts. Many ads included artists' photographs. And the logo of the Odeon record company dotted the page here and there, identifying artists who recorded for the label. There was a lot of ink on the page.
On 18 November (above right), there was a sudden and very noticeable change. Beginning in that morning's edition the ads were smaller, and they were composed in very light, mostly sans-serif type, without photographs or logos. There was very little to visually distinguish one ad from the next.
The new format would persist through 1945. (Worldwide paper and ink shortages continued even after the war's end.) The pages of the Dance Guide from this period still contain much valuable data about the music and dance of the period, but it is almost exclusively in text form.
Unable to continue its logo-placement program within the individual Dance Guide ads, Discos Odeon began to place display ads (right) listing all the Odeon artists that were appearing that day, with the names and addresses of the venues. Each ad also named a "Record of the Moment," which in this example is Odeon No. 8393 with two tangos recorded on 24 October , De seis a siete and Fantasma by Miguel Caló's orchestra with the singer Raúl Iriarte.
The Odeon listing sometimes appeared on the same page as the Dance Guide, sometimes on a preceding or following page. (One potential advantage to the present-day researcher is that these listings include out-of-town and international engagements, which were only occasionally mentioned in earlier ads.)
The Odeon ads were created by the innovative Santa Cruz publicity agency. The first few ads employed reverse type (white on a black background) at the header and footer, as seen here. A week later, there was a switch to plain black-on-white type, possibly in response to further restrictions imposed by the newspaper. We'll have more to say about these listings in a future post.
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