What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago this week?
“CABINETS, CHAIRS, and a variety of useful and ornamental FURNITURE.”
Alexander Robertson, James Robertson, and John Trumbull had been publishing the Norwich Packet for less than a year when Abishai Bushnell, “CABINET AND CHAIR-MAKER,” ran an advertisement with distinctive graphic design elements. One of the printers or one of the compositors who worked in the printing office enclosed Bushnell’s copy within a border comprised of decorative ornaments. That set it apart from other content, both news and advertising, in the Norwich Packet. Bushnell may have also arranged to have his advertisement printed separated to use as labels for the “CABINETS, CHAIRS, and a variety of useful and ornamental FURNITURE” he made in his shop.
Except for the packet ship carrying letters from one port to another depicted in the masthead, the Norwich Packet did not usually feature visual images, neither to accompany news nor to adorn advertisements. That included woodcuts of ships, houses, horses, indentured servants, and enslaved people, stock images that many printers made available to advertisers. Yet the compositors did make liberal use of printing ornaments to indicate where one news item or editorial ended and another began and, especially, to separate advertisements from each other. An intricate border also enclosed the first letter of the first word in the first article on the first page of each edition of the Norwich Packet, a design that changed every few weeks. The masthead also made use of decorative type above and below the date of the newspaper, though that was a more recent innovation as the compositor experimented with the appearance of the front page.
Apparently, that was enough to convince Bushnell that Robertson, Robertson, and Trumbull could produce an advertisement that would attract attention with an ornate border that made it unlike anything else that appeared in the pages of the Norwich Packet. The cabinetmaker almost certainly placed a special order or gave specific instructions about how he wished his advertisement to look. After all, even though the compositor incorporated a lot of decorative type into each edition of the newspaper, no other advertisements received such treatment. Bushnell did not opt for a woodcut of a chair or other piece of furniture representing his trade, but he did find a way to make his advertisement more visible and more memorable.
