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

“CASH GIVEN FOR Clean Linen Rags.”

Nathaniel Patten’s advertisement in the January 29, 1776, edition of the Norwich Packet was neither as lengthy nor as visually stimulating as some of his previous advertisements, but that may have been because he had a different purpose in running it.  The “BOOKBINDER and STATIONER, at the East End of the Green,” did not provide a list of titles that he sold in this notice.  Instead, he announced, “CASH GIVEN FOR Clean Linen Rags, Of any Kind, Old Sail Cloth,” and other remnants of textiles that could be recycled into paper.  Similar calls for rags appeared frequently in early American newspapers, most often placed by the printers of those newspapers.  Such advertisements often consisted of only one or two lines.  Printers offered cash for rags without further explanation because readers knew exactly why they wanted the rags and how they would be used.

The proprietors of paper mills sometimes ran more elaborate advertisements requesting rags.  Especially when colonizers enacted nonimportation agreements that disrupted the supply of paper coming from England, those advertisements depicted saving rags to produce paper as a patriotic duty and a means for all colonizers, including women, to support the American cause.  Patten did not go into as much detail as John Keating did when promoting ‘THE FIRST Paper Manufactory Established in the city of New-York,” but he did say more than most printers.  “As Paper is one of the most necessary Articles now wanted,” the bookbinder and stationer asserted, “it is hoped that all true Friends to America, will exert their utmost Endeavours to promote and encourage such Manufactory” in Connecticut.  A lack of paper had indeed caused some printers to sometimes reduce the size of their weekly newspapers to half sheets (two pages) instead of full sheets (four pages) or miss publishing for a week or two.  That was the situation in New England and beyond.  Two days before Patten issued his call for rags in the Norwich Packet, for instance, John Pinkney, the printer of one Virginia Gazette, ran a notice in another Virginia Gazette to explain that he could not print his newspaper that week because he could not acquire paper.