My father, Monte Ghertler, wrote an ad to promote National Library Week when he was a copywriter at the firm Doyle Dane Bernbach. This ad was included in the book When Advertising Tried Harder. The Sixties: The Golden Age of American Advertising. Thanks to two Third Street friends for finding the book and lending it to me. The ad was a full white page with the alphabet printed out small. Here is the copy.

At your public library they’ve got these arranged in ways that can make you cry, giggle, love, hate, wonder, ponder and understand.

It’s astonishing what those twenty-six little marks can do.
    In Shakespeare’s hands they became Hamlet.
    Mark Twain wound them into Huckleberry Finn. James Joyce twisted them into Ulysees. Gibbon pounded them in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Milton shaped them into Paradise Lost. Einstein added some numbers and signs (to save time and space) and they formed The General Theory of Relativity.
    Your name is in them.
    And here we are using them now.
    Why? Because it’s National Library Week—an excellent time to remind you of letters, words, sentences and paragraphs. In short, books—reading.
    You can live without reading, of course. But it’s so limiting.
    How else can you go to Ancient Rome. Or Gethsemane? Or Gettysburg.
    Or meet such people as Aristotle, F. Scott Fitzgerald, St. Paul, Byron, Napoleon, Ghengis Khan, Tolstoi, Thurber, Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Margaret Mead?
    To say nothing of Gulliver, Scarlett O’Hara, Jane Eyre, Gatzby, Oliver Twist, Heathcliffe, Captain Ahab, Raskolnikov and Tom Swift?
    With books you can climb to the top of Everest, drop to the bottom of the Atlantic. You step upon the Galapagos, sail alone around the world, visit the Amazon, the Antartic, Tibet, the Nile.
    You can learn to do anything from cooking a carrot to repairing a television set.
    With books you can explore the past, guess at the future and make sense out of today.
    Read. Your public library has thousands of books, all of which are yours for the asking.
    And add books to your own library. With each book you add, your home grows bigger and more interesting.
National Library Week, April 16-22