What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago this week?
“RD. SAUSE. CUTLER.”
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery … or a means of capitalizing on a competitor’s marketing efforts. On March 4, 1771, Bailey and Youle, cutlers from Sheffield, ran a newspaper advertisement notable for a woodcut that included their names and depictions of more than a dozen items available at their shop. Four weeks later, another cutler, Richard Sause, inserted a strikingly similar advertisement in the same newspaper, the New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury. Like Bailey and Youle, his notice began with a woodcut that included his name and images of various items in his inventory. He also listed those items and more, including “oyster knives, razors, scissors; pocket, pruning and pen knives; …[and] corkscrews.” In addition to the assortment of merchandise represented in both image and text, Sause also stocked “sundry other things too tedious to mention.”
Sause further enhanced his woodcut by incorporating his name into the depictions of a table knife and a sword, a modification not present in Bailey and Youle’s image of their wares. The table knife appeared in the upper left and the sword in the lower right, making it likely that viewers would encounter items branded with Sause’s name first and last as they glanced at the depictions of many kinds of cutlery. Sause’s woodcut also featured a greater number of items, testifying to the many choices he offered to consumers. In the copy that accompanied the image, he twice invoked variations of the phrase “other articles too tedious to mention,” deploying language not present in Bailey and Youle’s advertisement. Using his competitor’s notice as a model, Sause devised improvement for his own.
It seems unlikely that Sause produced this advertisement without having seen the notice that Bailey and Youle placed in the New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury. Furthermore, whoever carved the original woodcut probably carved the second, given the similarities between several pieces of cutlery depicted in each. Bailey and Youle continued running their advertisement when Sause’s notice first appeared, the similarities between the two all the more apparent because they were the only images that appeared anywhere in the April 1, 1771, edition of the New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury and its supplement, with the exception of the masthead. When Bailey and Youle published an advertisement that increased their visibility in the marketplace, Sause took notice and shamelessly replicated their efforts.
[…] one of Youle’s advertisements may have inspired imitation. In April 1771, Richard Sause ran advertisements with a woodcut that showed all sorts of cutlery items that he made at his shop just a few weeks after Bailey and […]
During the Revolutionary War, Bailey lived near West Point, he made George Washington’s sword (in the Smithsonian). His brother-in-law, James Youle (war wearabouts unknown), ceased his adverts. Sause signed a loyalty oath to the Brits and continued adverts.
[…] Richard Sause, a cutler, ran an advertisement that filled more than half a column. He listed a variety of goods from among the “neat and general Assortment of Cutlery, Hardware, Jewellery and Tunbridge Wares” that he recently imported, clustering the various categories of merchandise together with headings to help readers locate items of interest. A woodcut that depicted more than a dozen forms of cutlery, including knives, scissors, a saw, and a sword, adorned the advertisement. That image may have replicated the sign that marked the location of Sause’s shop. It likely looked familiar to readers who regularly perused the New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury since it had previously accompanied the cutler’s advertisements in that newspaper. […]
[…] The cutler had previous experience incorporating visual images into his advertisements in both the New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury and Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer. By the fall of 1773, many advertisements in New York’s […]