Boekenlegger uit archief Philip Zilcken 1898 - 1910

Editor: Here we have a vintage bookmark from somewhere between 1898 and 1910. It's a photographic albumen print featuring a portrait of Tolstoy, and it seems to be advertising Player's Navy Mixture tobacco. The whole thing has an undeniably sepia-toned, old-world feel. It looks pretty surreal. What leaps out at you when you see this? Curator: Oh, surreal is spot on! It's this collision of high and low, isn’t it? You've got Tolstoy, the literary titan, framed by art nouveau botanicals and, yes, hawking tobacco! The mind boggles. The delicate floral work gives it an almost dreamy, ethereal quality, like a forgotten artifact pulled from a half-remembered dream. What do you make of the composition? Editor: Well, the oval portrait nestled within those stylized plants definitely draws my eye, like looking into a mirror of the past. The "Player's Navy Mixture" text seems almost deliberately placed as a visual anchor, reminding us this isn't *just* art, it's advertising. Curator: Exactly! That tension is key. It’s a bookend, a bookmark for life, literature, smoke, memories. Don't you find the absurdity of combining Tolstoy with a tobacco advertisement quietly profound? It asks us to consider celebrity endorsement throughout time. We haven't changed that much after all. It is playful and thoughtful. I think I like it even more than when we began. Editor: I get it. Seeing them together, the artist makes me re-think how advertising can work like art, imbuing the everyday with a sort of quirky immortality. It makes you wonder who else got the treatment, and what bookmark ideas never happened. Curator: Precisely! That’s why art whispers and sometimes screams across time, urging us to look again, think anew and occasionally have a quiet little chuckle with a literary genius selling cigarettes.