3,015 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
This brief foreword introduces another author's history of advertising, and Mataja uses it to make a case for the subject itself. Advertising, he observes, is rich in history but poor in historians—an institution in constant contact with the economy, public life, technology, and art, yet rarely traced across its own development. He commends the volume for following each advertising medium along its course from the simple and artless toward the composite and mass-produced, for drawing together sources that lie unusually scattered, and above all for its rich pictorial apparatus. The whole, he suggests, reveals how great a sum of thought, ingenuity, and craft has already been placed in advertising's service, and he offers the book as a spur to its technical, artistic, and ethical advancement.
Die Reklame ist reich an Geschichte, weniger reich an Geschichtsschreibern.
English translation: “Advertising is rich in history, but less rich in historians.”
A handwritten card, dated 23 January 1927, carries the thanks of Viktor Mataja — economist, former minister, and retired president of Austria's federal statistical office — to the journalist Ignaz Grünberg, who had reviewed favorably the idea of advertising treated as a science. The tribute is apt. Mataja had habilitated in political economy in 1884, taught at Vienna and Innsbruck, and earned his reputation as a pioneer of the subject with 'Die Reklame' (1910), which held that publicity was a proper object of scholarly and statistical study rather than mere commercial noise. Written from Italian soil, where Grünberg's essay reached him only belatedly, this small autograph binds a founder of advertising theory to the daily life of the Viennese press.
Seit geraumer Zeit von Wien abwesend u. auf italienischem Boden habe ich Ihren Aufsatz ‚Die Reklame als Wissenschaft‘ erst verspätet zu Gesicht bekommen.
English translation: “Having been away from Vienna for some time and on Italian soil, I only belatedly caught sight of your essay 'Advertising as a Science.'”
A child-labour law could penalize the manufacturer who obeyed it while leaving competitors free to exploit children. This practical contradiction anchors Viktor Mataja’s study of French labour protection from the campaigns preceding the 1841 law to the threshold of reform in 1874. Drawing on parliamentary debates, administrative reports and workers’ newspapers, Mataja asks why protective principles so often failed to become effective safeguards. He locates responsibility not only in weak statutes but in unpaid, socially dependent inspectors, unused administrative powers and political resistance to workers’ independence. His account also exposes tensions within reform itself: restrictions on children’s work threatened household earnings, while imperial welfare concessions could serve political control. The reader discovers how inspection, competitive pressures and workers’ ability to organize shaped what legislation actually delivered.