Life, 1906-01-04 · page 48 of 48
Life — January 4, 1906 — page 48: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is primarily a **product advertisement**, not political satire. The page uses a visual pun to sell shaving soap. The illustration depicts a rural village scene with a barber shaving a customer outside a cottage—a "close shave" in the literal, traditional sense. The ad's cleverness lies in its title: it equates the dangers of automobiling (a modern hazard of the 1906 era) with the dangers of using inferior shaving soap. The argument is that while car accidents are visibly dangerous, poor soap causes hidden damage to facial skin—redness, soreness, and infection. Williams' soap allegedly prevents this by being "creamy, emollient, antiseptic." The humor is gentle wordplay rather than satire: a "close shave" means both a near-miss accident and a close shaving experience. For a modern reader, the automobile reference dates this to when cars were still novel enough to warrant such comparisons.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
WILLIAMS “ext There are many “close shaves” connected with automobiling—but the dangers of automobiling are apparent, while the dangers from using inferior shaving soaps are just as real and more insidious. In unseen ways they attack the delicate face tissues, leaving the skin red, sore and perhaps infected. It makes shaving easy and keeps faces healthy. That's the whole thing in a nutshell. THE J. B. WILLIAMS COMPANY Glastonbury, Conn.