What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago today?
“The great Demand for the Proceedings of the Continental Congress, has caused a second Edition to be printed.”
Hot off the press and flying off the shelf! Hugh Gaine, the printer of the New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury, reported a high level of public interest in the Extracts from the Votes and Proceedings of the American Continental Congress. On November 14, 1774, he took the unusual measure of inserting an advertisement among the news to inform readers that the “great Demand for the Proceedings of the Continental Congress, has caused a second Edition to be printed; — which is this Day published, and sold by Hugh Gaine, in Hanover-Square.” Although news and advertisements often appeared next to each other in colonial newspapers, printers did not ordinarily intersperse advertisements and news. That made it noteworthy that Gaine’s advertisement appeared below local news from New York and above shipping news from the custom house.
Although Gaine published and sold a “second Edition” of the Extracts, he was not responsible for the first edition printed in New York. On November 3, John Holt, the printer of the New-York Journal, ran a notice advising of “THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS, With their Letter to the People of QUEBEC, To be sold by the Printer.” Unlike an advertisement for a Philadelphia edition in the Pennsylvania Journal the previous day, Holt’s notice did not list the contents. He apparently considered the meeting of the First Continental Congress sufficient recommendation for marketing a pamphlet that gave an overview of the decisions made by the delegates. He ran the same advertisement, without update, a week later. Not long after that, Gaine advertised a “second Edition” that seems to have been a competing edition. He had not previously advertised the Extracts in the New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury, suggesting that he had witnessed the popularity of Holt’s edition and decided to generate revenue by printing and selling his own edition. The political pamphlet had not necessarily sold out, as Gaine’s advertisement suggested, but instead a second printer entered the market. In his History of Printing in America (1810), patriot printer Isaiah Thomas remarked that “Gaine’s political creed, it seems, was to join the strongest party.”[1] Gaine may not have held to any political principles as strongly as Holt, who had incorporated the “Unite or Die” political cartoon into the masthead of his newspaper, yet his actions did serve the purposes of the First Continental Congress. The delegates had ordered the publication of the Extracts. Disseminating that political pamphlet did not require sincere belief on the part of Gaine or any other printer, though most who published and marketed it did tend to vocally support the American cause throughout the imperial crisis.
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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 Books, 1970), 472.