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

“The Sign of the SUN and BREECHES.”

Cornelius Ryan, “LEATHER DRESSER and BREECHES MAKER,” pursued his trade at “the Sign of the SUN and BREECHES, IN THE BROADWAY” in New York.  Residents and visitors to the busy port likely glimpsed his sign as they traversed the streets of the city.  Readers of the New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury almost certainly noticed the woodcut that adorned the advertisements he ran in that newspaper.  It included the same elements as the sign that marked his location, a sun above a pair of breeches.  The sun had a face that stared directly at readers as well as eight rays enclosed within a corona.  In addition, the initials “CR,” for Cornelius Ryan, appeared between the legs of the breeches.  The woodcut may or may not have replicated Ryan’s sign; at the very least, it strengthened the association that the leather dresser and breeches maker wanted consumers to have with his business and visual representations of it.

To achieve that, Ryan invested in commissioning a woodcut stylized for his exclusive use.  Most entrepreneurs did not go to such lengths when they advertised in colonial newspapers, though Smith Richards, who kept shop “At the Tea canister and two sugar loaves,” once again included a woodcut depicting those items in his notice in the same supplement that carried Ryan’s advertisement.  Nesbitt Deane advertised hats he “Manufactured,” but did not adorn his notice with the image of a tricorne hat and his name within a banner that he had included in other notices on several occasions over the years.  Since advertisers paid by the amount of space their notices occupied rather than the number of words, woodcuts amounted to significant additional expense beyond the costs of producing them.  For Ryan, the woodcut accounted for nearly half of his advertisement, doubling the cost of running it in the New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury.  He may very well have considered it worth the investment if the striking image prompted prospective customers to read the copy more closely.  The visual image served as a gateway for the appeals to skill, quality, price, consumer choice, and customer satisfaction that followed.