Life, 1923-03-08 · page 29 of 37
Life — March 8, 1923 — page 29: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is **not a cartoon or satire**—it's a straightforward luxury automobile advertisement from Life magazine's early automotive era. The page promotes Lincoln automobiles (a Ford Motor Company division) to wealthy readers. The ad uses aspirational imagery: a Lincoln car positioned before an ornate classical building with grand columns and steps, suggesting prestige and permanence. The text emphasizes "enduring quality" and "deep-rooted" excellence, positioning Lincoln as the "finest motor car" available. The rhetorical strategy targets affluent readers by appealing to their desire for understated superiority—the car's quality supposedly speaks for itself through performance rather than flashy design. This represents typical early-20th-century luxury marketing: associating a product with classical architecture and refined taste to justify premium pricing to an elite audience.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
ENDURING QUALITY Whatever may be the attributes which attract you to this motor car, with every mile that passes you will become more firmly mindful of the deep-rooted quality which is, after all, the key to every excellence it embodies. There is no escaping the fact of Lincoln worth, any more than it-is possible to lose sight of the exemplary facilities from which its goodness springs. While you may never be sensible of its doing so, it will, through a character of performance in which you continually exult, quietly but solidly intrench itself in your good opinion for exactly what it is—the finest motor car that it is possible to produce. LINCOLN MOTOR COMPANY | DIVIQION OF FORD MOTOR COMPANY, DETROIT, MICHIGAN comicbooks.com