One of my auto history books has a chapter of advertising for Willys variants in other countries. Willys covered more of the world than GM, and its foreign branches often developed totally original cars.
This 1977 ad was a sample created by AMC during its ownership of Willys, providing a template for local companies to advertise the new diesel CJ. The sample text was clearly made by a Lorem Ipsum generator.
It’s not quite the same as the text generated by modern computers; the inflections end in -d or -b too often, while modern generators have accurate inflections. Photo typesetting systems in the 60s and 70s had their own proprietary computers, which would have been capable of generating text.
A page on the history of Lorem Ipsum claims that it began when a printer in the 1500s used pi to print a sample. This doesn’t make sense. A pied form is just random. If you’re going to arrange type to print a sample that looks readable, you’d pull it from a case, not from a pied galley.
The same page says (more convincingly) that the source came from a book on good and evil by Cicero.
Though I spent several years setting type in the ’70s, I never saw Lorem Ipsum until the web era. Type catalogs used real English samples appropriate to the font: headlines, advertisements, invoices, business cards, etc.
Here are some samples from an 1897 Inland Type Foundry catalog. Some are appropriate, some are having a little fun.
And finally a reference to antiquity, but not Cicero! King Solomon foresees the inevitable superiority of Inland Type and places an order to be filled 2000 years in the future.
Polistra's Mill 