The A, B, C’s of saving
BMO has been making learning about finances fun for children since the mid-20th century. In the Corporate Archives, we have advertisements from this period that were designed to be folded into a book cover to protect schoolbooks. They were created in an effort to encourage schoolchildren to establish good financial habits. The covers even had a convenient space on the front for students to write their name, class, school, and book title.
The bank produced several iterations of these schoolbook covers between 1945-1966. The earliest covers have a simpler design, featuring images of adults and children working and playing. The back of the cover asks, “Do you want a bike?” and encourages students to save their pocket money in a Bank of Montreal Savings Account so they could buy their much-coveted two-wheeler.
Later iterations of the book covers were more elaborate, providing a chronological overview of the history of the modern English alphabet. The book covers’ borders traced the origins and evolutions of individual letters in the English alphabet from Egyptian hieroglyphics and the Phoenician alphabet to the Greek and Latin alphabets. The letter K, for example, is described as originating from the Egyptian hieroglyphic of a hand. These book covers were innovative and educational – just another way that BMO helped customers make real financial progress. One for the books!