About 20 years ago, I bought the complete set of National Geographic on CD-ROM. It was 110 years worth of their magazines-every page of every issue, viewable on your computer. To be honest, the quality of the pictures did not live up to the original sources, but what saved the day were the original ads in issues that ran from about 1890 onward. They were an entertaining and revealing window on our forebears. People's heads today would explode at some of the more casually racist and sexist themes, but as you say, a lot of them were creative, beautifully drawn and oft times humorous, though sometimes more from a WTF point of view governed by modern sensibilities.
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