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

“Cannot fail to give universal Satisfaction to their Customers.”

I originally selected this advertisement to further demonstrate that even though advertisers usually wrote the copy but left the format and other aspects of graphic design to compositors who worked in printing offices they sometimes gave instructions about how they wanted specific elements of how their notices to appear.  In this instance, John Barrett and Sons ran a lengthy advertisement enclosed within a border of decorative type in three newspapers simultaneously.  Their notice appeared in the Boston Evening-Post, the Boston-Gazette, and the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-Boy on May 9, 1774.  On closer examination, however, I discovered that this advertisement presents further evidence that printing offices in Boston sometimes shared type already set for advertisements.  A week ago, I documented this with Joseph Peirce’s advertisement.

As was the case with that notice, the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-Boy operated independently.  Among other newspapers, Barrett and Sons’ advertisement apparently originated in the Boston-Gazette before being reprinted in the Boston Evening-Post.  Notably, it ran next to Peirce’s advertisement in the May 9 edition, that type having made its way back to the printing office for the Boston-Gazette.  The visual evidence makes it difficult to dispute that some printers transferred type from one newspaper to another.  The printing ornaments that formed the border around the advertisement make that clear.  Even if the compositor for the Boston Evening-Post happened to copy the font, capitalization, italics, size, centering, left justification, right justification, and other format exactly from the Boston-Gazette, itself a highly unlikely scenario, matching the decorative type would have been practically impossible.  Note that the compositor chose one type of ornament for the upper and lower borders and a different ornament for the left and right borders, except for the last ornament before the right corner in the lower border.  In that position appears the same ornament from the left and right borders in the advertisements in both newspapers.  Furthermore, the compositor introduced one more variation midway down the left and right borders, marking where the side-by-side columns listing goods begin.  To the left of “Chints, Calicoes” and to the right of “An Assortment,” a different ornament appears, once again in both the Boston-Gazette and the Boston Evening-Post.

Barrett and Sons’ advertisement did not make it into the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Weekly News-Letter, in any form, unlike the type for Peirce’s advertisement that seems to have been transferred from the Boston-Gazette and the Boston Evening-Post to that newspaper.  That might have been due to Richard Draper’s poor health and seeking a partner to assist him in running his printing office making such coordination too difficult at that moment.  Yet the type for Peirce’s advertisement made its way into that newspaper once again on May 12 after running in the Boston-Gazetteon May 9 (but not in the Boston Evening-Post for a second time on that day).  This suggests instead that Barrett and Sons, the advertisers, made decisions about which publications would carry their advertisement, likely based on their own marketing budget and sense of which newspapers had the best circulation.  This instance raises further questions about the coordination among printing offices, especially the logistics, the bookkeeping, and the fees.  These advertisements demonstrate that printers in Boston who usually competed with each other for both subscribers and advertisers cooperated on occasion when it came to inserting advertisements in their newspapers.