What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago today?

“He has an Assortment of GOODS on Hand.”

Although advertisements often appeared on the final pages of eighteenth-century newspapers, that was not always the case. Printers and compositors experimented with the placement of news, paid notices, and other content. Consider, for example, the January 20, 1769, edition of the Connecticut Journal and New-Haven Post-Boy. The front page featured both advertising and news. Immediately below the masthead, Michael Todd’s notice calling on former customers to settle accounts and advising prospective customers that he had “an Assortment of GOODS on Hand, as usual,” was the first item readers encountered. Two more advertisements ran in the same column above news from Boston. News from London comprised the remainder of the page. An editorial concerning the local “Manufacturing of Linen” to “put a Stop to the Importation of British Cloth,” submitted by pseudonymous “JONATHAN HOMESPUN,” comprised most of the second page. Other editorial items filled the third page. News from Philadelphia and New York, as well as the shipping news from New Haven, appeared on the final page, along with two more advertisements. Readers who perused that issue of the Connecticut Journal from first page to last began and ended with advertisements, but that was not always the case.

Usually printers Thomas Green and Samuel Green or a compositor who worked for them positioned the paid notices after the other content. Whoever set the type for the January 20 edition experimented with something different. For the standard four-page issue, type for the first and fourth pages, printed on one side of a broadsheet, could be set independently of the second and third pages, printed on the other side. Skilled compositors, for instance, could start a new item in the first column of the second page and end another item in the last column of the third page, allowing them to begin printing one side of the broadsheet before even setting type for the other. The compositor may have made an effort to do so in the January 20 edition of the Connecticut Journal, but was not completely successful. The letter from Jonathan Homespun filled most of the second page. A few lines of another editorial ran at the bottom, overflowing to the third page. A recipe for a home remedy began at the bottom of the third page and concluded on the fourth. The compositor then had sufficient space to insert all of the advertisements on that last page, but opted to place some on the first instead, departing from the usual format for that newspaper. As a result, that issue of the Connecticut Journal replicated the appearance of other newspapers that sometimes ran advertisements on the first page. Colonial printers did not uniformly give precedence to news on the front page and relegate advertising to other places in the newspaper.