What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago this week?
“All kinds of business will be transacted on commission.”
John Holt included a significant amount of content – news, editorials, advertisements – in each issue of the New-York Journal. Like other colonial newspapers, his publication consisted of four pages published once a week. Most featured three columns per page, but the New-York Journal had four. Even then, that often was not enough space for everything submitted to Holt’s printing office, prompting him to distribute supplements with even more content.
Such was the case with the January 12, 1775, edition. In addition to the standard issue, Holt printed a four-page supplement that featured both news and advertising. Some of that advertising, however, had an unusual format as the result of Holt using a smaller sheet that accommodated only three columns. That left enough space to insert advertisements in the right margins, though they had to be divided into shorter segments and printed perpendicular to the rest of the content.
For instance, William Tongue’s advertisement for a “MERCHANT BROKER’S OFFICE” that previously ran in a single column appeared in five short segments in the right margin on the second page. In addition to maximizing the use of space in the supplement, it saved the compositor time because the type had already been set. On other pages, the right margins contained multiple shorter advertisements, such as Jonathan Durrell’s advertisement for locally produced “EARTHEN WARE” divided into three segments and a notice concerning Isaac Adolphus’s estate divided into two segments on the first page. In total, Holt managed to squeeze eight advertisements of various lengths, including one offering an enslaved woman for sale, into the margins of the supplement, following a strategy commonly used by colonial printers.
Apparently, the printer made a calculated decision about the size of the sheets to use for the supplement; it was not the result of a disruption in his paper supply caused by current events. A week earlier on January 5, he used the larger sheet for both the standard issue and a supplement with four full columns, but on January 19 used the larger sheet for the standard issue and, once again, the slightly smaller sheet for the supplement. On that occasion, he used only a half sheet, distributing a two-page supplement devoted entirely to paid notices. That suggests that he carefully managed his resources rather than resorting to whatever paper came to hand. Advertisements and other content sometimes appeared in the margins out of necessity when printers had difficulty acquiring paper during the imperial crisis, but seemingly that was not the case in this instance. Instead, Holt shrewdly balanced how much content to print against anticipated revenues from advertising.
