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

“A Number of ANXIOUS FRIENDS, and all the MILITARY MEN who wanted MITTENS.”

The screed extended an entire column and overflowed into another in the February 1, 1776, edition of the Pennsylvania Evening Post.  It continued the feud between Thomas Paine, the author of Common Sense, and Robert Bell, the publisher of the first edition who embarked on an unauthorized second edition.  Two days earlier, advertisements for Bell’s second edition and a forthcoming edition that Paine collaborated with William Bradford and Thomas Bradford in publishing ran side by side in that newspaper.  One included an address “To the PUBLIC” by Bell and the other featured a “declaration” by the author.  Paine, who still remained anonymous given the radical contents of the pamphlet, concluded by stating, “This is all the notice that will ever be taken of [Bell] in future.”

For his part, Bell was not finished taking notice of Paine.  He quickly submitted a response, addressed “TO MR. ANONYMOUS,” for publication among the advertisements that ran in the next issue of the Pennsylvania Evening Post.  He mocked Paine because the “Feeble author” “took the field” and engaged in battle that he supposedly could not win against the “Provedore to the Sentimentalists,” as Bell often referred to himself in the subscription proposals he circulated and in his newspaper advertisements for book auctions.  The publisher claimed that he had been “wantonly, and maliciously, dragged … into the unwished for field of public altercation,” yet he would defend his actions and his reputation.  Bell attacked Paine’s claim that he wished to remain anonymous: “You say you wanted to remain unknown … but, in practice, yourself telling it in every beer-house, gives the direct LIE to the assertor of such falsehood.”  Even though Paine’s name had not yet appeared in print, Bell alleged that the author had been bragging about writing Common Sense in taverns around town.

Bell also demeaned “boasted intentional generosity” of the “Would-be-Author” who had declared that he planned to use his share of the profits from the first edition, which he never received, to purchase mittens for the soldiers participating in the American invasion of Canada.  Bell insinuated that Paine mentioned drew the “MILITARY MEN who wanted MITTENS” into the dispute as a means of currying favor with the public as he threatened “malevolent LAW SUITS … against one industrious Bookseller, who never asked or received any thing from the public without giving an equivalent.”  In contrast to Paine’s manipulations of both his friends who acted as intermediaries and the public, Bell portrayed himself as an honest entrepreneur, “a poor individual who neither attempteth nor wisheth for more FRIENDS than the rectitude of his conduct in business, an in the affairs of society, shall both gain and retain.”

Taking another shot at Paine, Bell instructed him that “your taking the public field was bad, because there was no foundation for it, unless envy be allowed a good one.”  Furthermore, his “management of the fight and precipitate flight was worse – and final exit (as you say) worse and worse.”  The publisher scorned the way that author backed down, comparing his handling of the situation to a “rascally PUPPY, who, with open mouth, runs snarling at an honest manly DOG, whose notice is attracted by the yelpings of the ill-natured CUR.”  Paine, the “PUPPY,” ran away with his tail between his legs once he was on the receiving end of “words of stern contempt.”

Much of the dispute revolved around the revenues generated by Common Sense (or, as “the assignees of the nameless author” discovered, a surprising lack of profits on the first edition).  Yet the feud and the publication of multiple editions of Common Sense did produce revenues for Benjamin Towne, the printer of the Pennsylvania Evening Post. The competing advertisements comprised one-quarter of the content in the January 30 edition and Bell’s notice in response to Paine’s “declaration” occupied nearly as much space.  With those advertisements, Towne did not need to sell a single copy of the pamphlet to turn a profit on its publication by other printers.