What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?
“JUST PUBLISHED … SWAN’s BRITISH ARCHITECT … Illustrated with upwards of ONE HUNDRED DESIGNS AND EXAMPLES.”
At the end of June 1775, Robert Bell, “Printer and Bookseller,” and John Norman, “Architect Engraver,” published an American edition of Abraham Swan’s British Architect: Or, the Builders Treasury of Staircases. Norman had previously promoted the work with newspaper advertisements and proposals “with a specimen of the plates and letter press” that prospective subscribers could examine. When the volume was ready for sale and for subscribers to collect the copies they reserved, Bell and Norman ran advertisements in the Pennsylvania Gazette and the Pennsylvania Journal on June 28. The following day they placed the same advertisement in the Pennsylvania Evening Post. On July 1, it appeared in the Pennsylvania Ledger and in Story and Humphreys’s Pennsylvania Mercury on July 7. Of the newspapers printed in English in Philadelphia at the time, only Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet did not carry the advertisement. Bell and Norman made a significant investment in marketing their edition of Swan’s British Architect.
To entice prospective customers, they specified that the book was “Illustrated with upwards of one hundred DESIGNS and EXAMPLES, curiously engraved on sixty Folio Copper-Plates” bound into the volume. They also appended a “Memorandum” requesting that the “Artists and all others who wish to see useful and ornamental ARCHITECTURE flourish … look at the Work.” If residents of the largest and most cosmopolitan urban port in the colonies wanted their city to maintain and enhance its level of sophistication, Bell and Norman implied, they needed to consider architecture and design important cultural pursuits. To that end, they also marketed similar publications to those who purchased Swan’s British Architect. Readers found to subscription proposals bound into the book. The first one, advertising The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Assistant with drawings by John Folwell, a local cabinetmaker, and engravings by Norman (dated June 20), faced the title page. The other, advertising an American edition of Swan’s Collection of Designs in Architecture, Containing New Plans and Elevations of Houses, for General Use (dated June 26), appeared immediately after the letterpress explanations of the engraved illustrations. The dates on the subscription proposals suggest that they might have circulated separately, yet Bell and Norman made certain to place them before customers who already confirmed an interest in the subject matter.