Mid-Century Ads: Advertising from the Mad Men Era, ed Jimy Helmann

Cigarettes feature heavily in this vast, two-volume collection (Taschen)

Cigarettes and alcohol; cars with tail fins; technological utopias and the lifestyle, clothes and accoutrements of the international jetsetter.

These are the things that Don Draper's Madison Avenue advertising agency would have been selling to the American people during those colourful, optimistic postwar boom years of the Fifties and Sixties, and they feature heavily in this vast, two-volume collection of digitally restored real print ads from the period.

Nevertheless, as a fascinating piece of social history as well as art history, it can't help but reveal anxieties – the Cold War, race – beneath the surface of US society.