concept
Johann Hoff's Chocolate
Johann Hoff's chocolate
also: Шоколад Иоганна Гоффа
A widely advertised patent-medicine and consumer brand of the period (Johann Hoff's malt extract and chocolate); its ubiquitous newspaper advertising made the name a byword for commercial puffery.
Reading notes
- The Alarm Clock's Calendar §94 Johann Hoff's chocolate
A widely advertised patent-brand product of the era, whose omnipresent newspaper puffery made the name a byword for commercial advertising excess.
- To Al. P. Chekhov, 22–23 February 1887. Moscow. §17 Johann Hoff.
Johann Hoff's malt extract and chocolate, a widely and repetitively advertised patent-medicine brand of the period; its ubiquity in the papers made the name a stock joke, used here (with the invented "Hugo-Vörlich" of the preceding section) as a mock commercial signature closing the letter.
- Biographies of Notable Contemporaries §9 Guyot, Johann Hoff
Real 19th-century purveyors of patent nostrums (Guyot's cough drops, Johann Hoff's malt extract) whose newspaper advertisements were a fixture of the Russian press; Chekhov names them to root the parody in a recognizable contemporary genre of quack advertising.