[Comeekz]

Thought this was pretty funny… I bought this old book published in 1904 at the local used bookstore today and found this old ad inside, probably used as a bookmark, which is apparently an ad for a drawing school – maybe predated Art Instruction Schools by several decades! I like how they say if you're drawing is even 40% as good as the sample you qualify – I guess their standards were not very high back then LOL

[crashryan]

Correspondence schools were big business around the turn of the century. Correspondence Institute of America started in the early '00's offering a variety of courses in addition to art. Unfortunately they turned out to be a scam! The New York Times had a 1911 article about the school being busted for defrauding hundreds of people. Interestingly, influential magazine cartoonist Eugene "Zim" Zimmerman got one of his first jobs at the Correspondence Institute. He recognized it as a scam and was so upset that he quit and started his own legit correspondence cartooning course. It served him as a side hustle for a number of years.

[NathanMoore]

That’s actually a really cool piece of history. It’s funny on the surface, but it also shows how these kinds of “learn from home” offers have been around for a long time. The 40 percent comment really stands out, it feels like a classic marketing trick to make people feel like they already qualify. Even back then, they clearly understood how to appeal to beginners and boost confidence just enough to get them interested.

Also interesting how some of these early programs blurred the line between legit education and outright scams. Makes you realize not much has changed, just the format has.

[Robb_K]

Actually many such cartooning and illustration "correspondence schools" were legitimate during the early 1900s(Landon School being the best known), when they proliferated, and many of the greatest early animators, newspaper cartoonists, and illustrators of the first half of the 20th Century actually "graduated" from such schools.  As I remember, many of Van Beuren's, Fleischer's, Disney's, and Warner Brothers' early animators had done so, and many famous illustrators, as well (Nate Collier, Walt Disney, Roy Crane, Carl Barks, Jack Cole, Floyd Gottfredson, Charles Schulz, and almost every 1930s and 1940s animator I can think of).