Shadows in photographs

Scanning old photographs that belonged to my grandmother and great-grandmother. Most are just snapshots or studio poses, and not too many reveal all that much about what’s going on in the world. But there is one very interesting photograph of a group of infantrymen in the Spanish-American War, thought to have been taken in the Philippines:


The amazing thing about scanning these old, faded images is that you can pull up details that you would never be able to make out with the naked eye. In the middle left of the photo, there are what appear to be cut paper decorations on the shelves, and a couple of advertisements stuck to the boards. One of them looked to be legible, so I zoomed in and found:



Off to Google, of course, where I learn that Imperial Granum was a pretty well-known sort of food. It appears that you added it to milk and that it was meant for babies and the infirm and was supposed to be highly digestible. None of the ads I found offer even a hint as to what it was, and unlike Postum (originally sold as a healthful alternative to giving your kids coffee in the morning — so the Tweek family didn’t come up with that on their own) and some others, it’s pretty much forgotten today. I couldn’t find the ad that appears on the wall of this Philippine bar, but I did find this:



Just below that ad in Harper’s is an ad for wine laced with coca, which would have struck me as an excellent idea back in The Debauched Years, and it’s hard to understand why it didn’t catch on; I mean, just HOW addictive does something need to be?


Wonder if the boys in the fancy jackets had any of this stuff to mix in with their Imperial Granum in the mornings?