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

“All Persons indebted to T. GREEN, either for News-Papers, Advertisements, or otherwise are requested to make immediate Payment.”

Among the many advertisements that appeared on the final page of the August 5, 1774, edition of the Connecticut Gazette, Timothy Green, the printer, inserted a brief notice calling on readers to settle accounts in his printing office in New London.  “All Persons indebted to T. GREEN, either for News-Papers, Advertisements, or otherwise,” it read, “are requested to make immediate Payment.”  The “otherwise” included books and pamphlets.  Green simultaneously advertised several including “POEMS on various SUBJECTS, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL, By PHILLIS WHEATLEY,” “A PLEA, In Vindication of the Connecticut Title to the contested Lands, lying West of the Province of New-York … By BENJAMIN TRUMBULL,” and “The JUDGMENT of whole Kingdoms and Nations … By Lord Somers.”  Green likely stocked stationery and writing supplies as well.  Many printers even peddled patent medicines for supplementary revenue.

Printers also did job printing, such as blanks (printed forms), broadsides, and handbills.  When Green called on those indebted to him for advertisements to submit payment, he may have meant customers who ordered broadsides, handbills, and other advertising ephemera.  That was sometimes what printers meant when they solicited advertisements.  Such was the case when Joseph Crukshank announced that he opened a printing office in Philadelphia in 1769.  “Particular care will be taken,” he pledged, “to do Advertisements, Blanks, &c. on very short notice.”  Isaiah Thomas was more specific in the colophon that regularly ran at the bottom of the final page of the Massachusetts Spy in the early 1770s: “Small HAND-BILLS at an Hour’s Notice.”  That may have been the kind of work that Green meant, but he may have also intended to include paid notices that appeared in the Connecticut Gazette.  If so, extending credit to newspaper advertisers did not align with the business practice traditionally identified by historians of the early American press: printers supposedly allowed credit for subscriptions yet demanded payment in advance for newspaper advertisements.  The revenue from advertising underwrote whatever subscribers neglected to pay.  Yet printers sometimes inserted notices that indicated they had published newspaper advertisements on credit.  Ebenezer Watson, printer of the Connecticut Courant, reconsidered that policy when he announced that “No Advertisements will for the future be published in this paper, without the money is first paid.”  Green may have allowed credit for advertisements in the Connecticut Gazette.  The wording in his notice does not definitively eliminate that possibility.