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

“COMMON SENSE; ADDRESSED TO THE INHABITANTS OF AMERICA.”

Robert Bell, one of the most prominent printers and booksellers in America, already had experience with extensive advertising campaigns by the time he published and marketed Thomas Paine’s Common Sense in January 1776.  Within a week, Bell inserted advertisements for what would become the most influential political pamphlet of the era of the American Revolution in all six newspapers printed in Philadelphia.

He started with the Pennsylvania Evening Post on January 9, then placed nearly identical advertisements in the Pennsylvania Gazette and the Pennsylvania Journal on January 10.  On January 13, the advertisement ran in the Pennsylvania Ledger (and once again in the Pennsylvania Evening Post, the city’s only triweekly rather than weekly newspaper).  Bell also ran the advertisement in Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet on January 15.  His notice had a privileged place in Pennsylvania Ledger (the first item in the first column on the first page) and Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet (the first advertisement following the news).

Even the Henrich Millers Pennsylvanischer Staaatsbote carried the advertisement on January 16, one week after Bell’s first advertisement appeared in the Pennsylvania Evening Post.  It was the only advertisement in English, even though the newspaper’s masthead advised that “All ADVERTISEMENTS to be inserted in this Paper, or printed single by HENRY MILLER, Publisher hereof, are by him translated gratis.”  Perhaps, since the pamphlet had not yet been translated into German, Bell instructed Miller to publish the advertisement in English to entice bilingual German colonizers.  Later in 1776, Melchior Steiner and Carl Cist, who had recently advertised that they printed in English, German, and other languages, published a German translation, Gesunde Vernunft.

The arguments and ideas that Paine presented in Common Sense caused a popular uproar.  Steiner and Cist’s German translation was only one of many local editions; printers in other cities and towns, especially in New York and New England, produced and advertised their own editions of the pamphlet.  Yet neither Paine nor Bell knew in advance that Common Sense would have such a reception.  It was not long before the author and the publisher had a falling out, causing Paine to work with William Bradford and Thomas Bradford, the printers of the Pennsylvania Journal, on the second edition.  Before that, however, Bell applied his long experience advertising books to promoting Common Sense in the public prints when he published the first edition.