Month: February 2021

February 2

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , ,

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

Providence Gazette (February 2, 1771).

“[illegible] and dispatched by a Packet the next Day for Falmouth.”

Digitization makes historical sources, like eighteenth-century newspapers, more readily accessible to scholars, students, and other readers.  Yet the digitization process sometimes introduces errors or obstacles into the research process.  For databases of digitized copies of newspapers, for instance, human error introduced in generating metadata or creating cataloging infrastructures sometimes makes it difficult or impossible to identify the appropriate dates for images of historical sources.  An image of a particular page of a newspaper, for example, might be mislabeled in the metadata and then cataloged with images from pages of another issue as if it were part of that issue.  Sometimes the news, advertising, and other content printed on that page provide context for unraveling the mystery, but not always.  While rare occurrences in the databases that support the Adverts 250 Project, such errors are not unknown.  The original documents, the newspaper pages themselves, are much less likely to be separated from the rest of the corresponding pages in their issues in the archive.

Other obstacles include errors made while photographing, scanning, or other means of creating images of original sources.  Consider the third page of the February 2, 1771, edition of the Providence Gazette available via America’s Historical Newspapers.  While that database consistently provides the highest quality images of eighteenth-century newspapers among the various databases consulted in the production of the Adverts 250 Project, occasionally minor irregularities do appear.  In this case, a band of faded text appears in the center of the page, making illegible portions of the articles in the first two columns and most of an advertisement in third column.  Recovering the missing portion of the articles requires consulting the original source in the archive, provided that the error was indeed introduced via remediation.  A working knowledge of eighteenth-century advertising practices, however, yields another means for discerning the contents of the advertisement.  The colophon for the Providence Gazette indicates that advertisements “are inserted in this Paper three Weeks for Four Shillings” and then an additional fee for each subsequent week.  Since most advertisements ran for a minimum of three weeks, the partially obscured advertisement, signed by Alexander Colden, likely appeared in other editions.

Providence Gazette (February 9, 1771).

Sure enough, the same advertisement ran on February 9 in the next issue of this weekly newspaper.  In that iteration, the entire advertisement is legible, allowing savvy readers to consult it to peruse the portions obscured in the previous issue.  Curiously, the February 9 edition features similar bands of lighter text on the first and third pages.  The band of illegible text on the third page, however, includes a few words rendered as legibly as the rest of the page.  This suggests that the problem may not have occurred in the remediation after all.  Instead, the illegible bands of text may have been the result of the printing press not making a firm impression, something that the printer managed to remedy before publishing the February 16 edition.  In that case, America’s Historical Newspapers provides a digital image that accurately replicates the original source in the archive.  Confirming this requires consulting the original newspapers.  They remain a vital source rather than rendered obsolete by digitization.

I am consulting with colleagues who work in research libraries where they have access to the Providence Gazette to find out if the originals include these illegible bands.  I will update this entry with any new information we uncover.

February 1

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , ,

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

New-Hampshire Gazette (February 1, 1771).

“If they will now Subscribe and pay Twelve Shillings, they shall have a Book at the same price of the Government.”

Advertisements helped to incite demand, but in the case of subscription notices they also helped to gauge demand.  Before taking books to press, printers distributed subscription notices in which they asked customers (or subscribers) to indicate the number of copies they wished to purchase and make a deposit in advance.  That allowed printers to estimate the total number to print, allowing for some surplus to sell to meet further demand among those who neglected to subscribe, but not so much as to cut into revenues too dramatically.  The deposits also helped to defray the costs of printing, thus making ventures less risky for printers.

Such was the case when Daniel Fowle and Robert Fowle inserted a subscription notice for “a NEW EDITION of the PROVINCE LAWS” in the February 1, 1771, edition of the New-Hampshire Gazette.  The Fowles proclaimed that the books “have been ordered by the Government to be publish’d; and a certain Number to be printed.”  While that order was secure, the Fowles anticipated additional demand for this publication, stating that they believed those ordered “by the Government” likely “will not be sufficient for supplying every particular Person, who may be desirous of having a LAW BOOK.”  In their subscription notice, they called on other prospective customers to “now Subscribe and pay Twelve Shillings” in order to have a Book at the same price of the Government.”

The Fowles also issued a warning to interested parties who did not act quickly.  “Those who neglect giving in their Names and paying their Part at the Time of Subscribing,” the printers cautioned, “will not only run the risqué of not having a set, as very few will be printed, exclusive of what the Court and others take off, but also have a quarter part more to pay for those few, than Subscribers.”  In other words, the Fowles planned to print only a limited number of additional copies, creating a scarcity in the market after fulfilling the orders received in advance.  They also planned to charge a higher price, fifteen shillings instead of twelve, for those surplus copies.  Subscribers received a discount by ordering in advance so the Fowles would know how many copies to print.

The Fowles sought to achieve two goals simultaneously.  They hoped to incite demand in the book they would soon publish while also estimating demand in order to make informed decisions about how many copies to print.  Subscription notices allowed printers to conduct a rudimentary form of market research in the eighteenth century.

Slavery Advertisements Published February 1, 1771

Carl Robert Keyes Slavery Adverts 250 Project

The Slavery Adverts 250 Project chronicles the role of newspaper advertising in perpetuating slavery in the era of the American Revolution. The project seeks to reveal the ubiquity of slavery in eighteenth-century life from New England to Georgia by republishing advertisements about enslaved people – for sale as individuals or in groups, wanted to purchase or for hire for short periods, runaways who liberated themselves, and those who were subsequently captured and confined in jails and workhouses – in daily digests on this site as well as in real time via the @SlaveAdverts250 Twitter feed, utilizing twenty-first-century media to stand in for the print media of the eighteenth century.

The project aims to provide modern audiences with a sense of just how often colonists encountered these advertisements in their daily lives. Enslaved men, women, and children appeared in print somewhere in the colonies almost every single day. Those advertisements served as a constant backdrop for social, cultural, economic, and political life in colonial and revolutionary America. Colonists who did not purport to own enslaved people were still confronted with slavery as well as invited to maintain the system by purchasing enslaved men, women, and children or assisting in the capture of so-called “runaways” who sought to free themselves from bondage. The frequency of these newspaper advertisements suggests just how embedded slavery was in colonial and revolutionary American culture in everyday interactions beyond the printed page.

These advertisements also testify to the experiences of enslaved men, women, and children, though readers must consider that those experiences have been remediated through descriptions offered by enslavers rather than enslaved people themselves. Often unnamed in the advertisements, enslaved men, women, and children were not invisible or unimportant in early America.

These advertisements appeared in colonial American newspapers 250 years ago today.

New-London Gazette (February 1, 1771).