JF PTak Science Books Daily Dose of Dr. Odd
Having made a casual stroll through LIFE magazine during the War Years (1939-1945) it seems to me as a general observation that there wasn’t that much attention paid to covering the war until 1942. Then there was gradual coverage from January ’42 to the summer of 1942, when things really started to pick up for American involvement–of course there was the Japanese invasion of China earlier than that in the Sino-Japanese War of 1935-1945, and most of the rest of Europe and the U.K. had been busy fighting Germany since the autumn of 1939, and then the Soviets were brutally brought into the war following the abrogation of their on-aggression pact with the Nazis in 1940.
The U.S. during those early years was having a very difficult national dialog about how America should deal with the conflict, a conversation that wasn’t turned into a great national monologue until 7 December 1941. Anyway, its my impression that war coverage in the nation’s premier picture magazine was fairly skimpy until 1942. By 1943, it was, in a way, all-war-all-of-the-time in the magazine’s pages, and in the ads as well. Suddenly (over the course of 15 months or something like that), relatively benign products like Ronson lighters sold themselves on their “being able to take it”, with squinty-eyed sailors lighting their cigs with the war-tough Ronson; Mrs. Don Ameche was selling Coleman’s Mustard with a war flavoring, underwear ads used Hitler’s name to sell their product, and so on. (These examples appeared on just two consecutive pages.) Use of the war in advertising appears in the Brit equivalent of LIFE, the Illustrated London News, but less so; in Germany, the Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig), the most popular popular-illustrated-read in that country, also featured war-based ads, but far less frequently. (Also the war coverage in that journal wasn’t nearly as frequent as in th eother two; and from my experience, as sanitized as the other two mags were, there was never any bad military news in the Illus Zeitung that I could see. Maybe ever. Certainly Hitler wasn’t taking about it, even when he was sacrificing entire armies to the Soviets and Mother Winter.)
So. What does this mean? I don’t know, not really. If the company was doing something for the war effort, and they advertised in LIFE, then the readers of that mag were going to know about it. On the other hand, if the company produced underwear and seemed to really have nothing to do with the conduct of the war, they were wrapping their product up in a kill-Hitler ribbon as well. Was this “bad”? Das machts nichts. It is interesting, though, but I really don’t know how it is interesting beyond knowing that it is.
Caveat: even though I’ve breezed through all of these magazines for the war years out in the warehouse, doing that rather than Doing Something Else, my grazing was not exactly an experimental undertaking. My observations are just general observations that seeped into me from a six-foot pile of war mags.)
These elements seem to be most populous in the illustrated sections of early encyclopediae, and dictionaries, and even encyclopedic dictionaries, where a number of different elements are displayed on the same page, different and generally unrelated images on the same engraved sheet, references for articles found in different parts of the book. 
