What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago today?
“A very low State of Health, prevents his making Collection of Intelligence and Speculation.”
Printers often inserted notices about their own businesses immediately after any local news items they published, increasing the chances that readers would take note even if they did not closely examine the advertisements that followed. Such was the case for a notice that Richard Draper placed in the May 5, 1774, edition of the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Weekly News-Letter. Right below news from Boston and Worcester, he declared, “The Publisher and Printer of this Paper being in a very low State of Health, prevents his making such Collection of Intelligence and Speculation, as his Customers must have expected to be given them.” He especially lamented that he had been hampered in gathering news “since the arrival of the last Vessels,” acknowledging that ships arriving from London brought updates about Parliament’s reaction to the destruction of tea in Boston Harbor the previous December. Colonial printers had to hustle to acquire the latest news and rumors from the other side of the Atlantic, learning what they could from captains and convincing merchants to share excerpts from the letters they received.
Even though a two-page supplement featuring “INTERESTING INTELLIGENCE” from London accompanied the May 5 edition, Draper did not consider himself up to the task of collecting and collating all the news flowing into the busy port. That being the case, he addressed his subscribers, “beg[ging] their Indulgence till he recovers Strength, or till the Paper falls into other Hands.” Planning for the latter, at least for the near future, he advised that a “Printer that understands collecting News, and carrying on a News Paper … may be concerned on very advantageous Terms” upon applying to Draper at his printing office. His appeal met with success. In the next issue he announced that he entered a “Co-Partnership with Mr. JOHN BOYLE, who was regularly brought up and has since carried on the Printing Business in this Town.” Together, the partners would “Endeavor to support the Reputation the said Paper has had for many Years past.” Draper alluded to the long publication history of the newspaper, established seventy years earlier. In his History of Printing in America (1810), Isaiah Thomas described the Boston News-Letter (later the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Weekly News-Letter) as “the first newspaper published in this country,” dismissing the single issue of Publick Occurences published in 1690.[1] Thomas reported that Draper’s “ill health render[ed] him unable to attend closely to business” so Boyle “undertook the chief care and management of the newspaper.”[2] A month later, Draper died. Hs widow, Margaret, continued in partnership with Boyle for about a year, but they went their separate ways after the Revolutionary War began. She then took John Howe as a partner, continuing to publish the newspaper “until the British troops left Boston in 1776.” Thomas notes that it was the only newspaper “printed in Boston during the siege.”[3] Despite Draper’s poor health and other turmoil, his newspaper lasted longer than any of the others published in Boston at the time he requested the “Indulgence” of his subscribers.
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[1] Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America: With a Biography of Printers and an Account of Newspapers (1810; New York: Weathervane Book, 1970), 231.
[2] Thomas, History of Printing, 145.
[3] Thomas, History of Printing, 231.