femmenietzsche:

Back in the 1980s, the giant German sf publisher Heyne tried out an experimental partnership with a soup company Maggi (they’re still around), and it was bonkers.

Under the terms of the deal, science fiction novels would be periodically interrupted by scenes in which the characters would drop everything and start eating Maggi soups, smacking their lips and exclaiming over just how delicious they were.

But to keep readers from confusing the soup ads with the novels, these scenes would be set in different type and set off with other weird textual flourishes.

To German sf fans of a certain vintage, these Maggi ads are legendary: I first heard tell of them from Tim Powers, who told me how he’d been leafing through a German edition of one of his books and discovered this weird stuff and asked a German fan about it and been told, “Oh, those are the soup ads, of course!”

Of course.

I remember hearing about (and from secondhand stores reading) 70s-80s American paperbacks with glossy Newport “Alive With Pleasure!” inserts