Classified Ads

April 22

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , , , , ,

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

Massachusetts Spy (April 22, 1774).

“GARDEN SEEDS.”

“GARDEN SEEDS.”

“GARDEN SEEDS.”

“GARDEN SEEDS.”

“GARDEN SEEDS.”

Susanna Renken advertised “GARDEN SEEDS” in several newspapers published in Boston throughout the spring of 1774, just as she had been doing for many years.  Many of her competitors, including Lydia Dyar, Elizabeth Greenleaf, and Anna Johnson, did the same.  Each of them deployed the same headline, “GARDEN SEEDS,” and listed the many options they stocked in their shops.  Dyar’s advertisement in the Massachusetts Spy included a final notation, “4 m,” intended for those who worked in the printing office, not for readers.  It indicated that her advertisement should run for four months before the compositor removed it.  All the advertisements placed by Boston’s female seed sellers became familiar sights in the public prints, an annual ritual that marked the changing of the seasons.

Their notices often appeared together.  In the April 22 edition of the Massachusetts Spy, for instance, four of their advertisements filled most of a column, running one after another with Greenleaf’s first, followed by Dyar’s and Renken’s, and finally Johnson’s.  That merits notice because printers did not tend to arrange advertisements by purpose or genre in eighteenth-century newspapers.  Paid notices were not classified advertisements because they were not clustered together according to classification or category.  Instead, they appeared in whatever order the compositor made them fit on the page.  The eight advertisements immediately to the right of those placed by the female seed sellers included one for a pamphlet for sale, two for imported textiles and “all sorts of Groceries … except TEA,” one for imported silks and “Hard-Ware and Cutlery GOODS,” one for a lottery to benefit Harvard College, one for “CHOICE MADDER,” a plant used in dyeing, one for “ENGLISH, India, and Scotch Goods, suitable for the season, one for a school for girls, and one for millinery goods “of the newest fashion,” in that order.  No guiding principle seemed to dictate which one followed which.  Yet the compositor made a choice to place the advertisements for “GARDEN SEEDS” together, even opting to put Sarah Dawson’s notice first.  The “Widow of the late Joseph Dawson, Gardner,” marketed a “collection of grafted and inoculated English FRUIT TREES,” but also happened to mention an “assortment of GARDEN SEEDS.”  That apparently convinced the compositor to position her advertisement with those from Dyar, Greenleaf, Johnson, and Renken.

This practice made the notices placed by female seed sellers in Boston during the era of the American Revolution precursors to classified advertisements that would eventually run in American newspapers in later periods.  For the most part, however, advertising in early American newspapers did not have that level of organization when it came to the order in which they appeared.

April 25

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , , , , , , , ,

What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago this week?

Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Weekly News-Letter (April 22, 1773).

“Garden Seeds, &c. Are to be Sold by the following Persons, who have advertised the Particular Sorts in this Paper.”

Richard Draper, the printer of the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Weekly News-Letter, did not have room for all of the news, letters, and advertisements submitted to his printing office for the April 22, 1773, edition.  To remedy the matter, he collected together and abbreviated notices about “Peas, Beans, [and] Garden Seeds” peddled by John Adams, Ebenezer Oliver, Elizabeth Greenleaf, Susanna Renken, Elizabeth Clark and Nowell, and Lydia Dyar.  Draper informed readers that the “following Persons, who have advertised the Particular Sorts in this Paper” continued to sell seeds, but “we have not Room this Week.”  Along with each name, the printer provided the location, but did not elaborate on their merchandise except for a note at the end intended to apply to each advertiser, a single line advising prospective customers that “All the Seeds [were] of the last Year’s Growth.”

Indeed, each of those purveyors of seeds had indeed “advertised the Particular Sorts in this Paper” … and in the four other newspapers published in Boston in the spring of 1773.  For two months readers had encountered advertisements placed by Adams, Oliver, Greenleaf, Renken, Clark and Nowell, and Dyar, an annual herald of the arrival of spring in Boston.  Eighteenth-century printers did not usually classify and categorize advertisements according to purpose and then organize them accordingly in the pages of their newspapers.  Advertisements for seeds, however, proved the exception to the rule. In each of the newspapers printed in the city, the compositors often clustered advertisements for seeds together.  When they did so, those advertisements filled entire columns and, sometimes, more than one column.  In the supplement that accompanied the previous edition of the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Weekly Mercury, the advertisements by Adams, Oliver, Greenleaf, Renken, Clark and Nowell, and Dyar accounted for half the content on the final page, running one after another in the last two columns.

That practice in place, it made sense for Draper to truncate those advertisements when he did not have sufficient space for all of them in the April 22 edition.  He likely assumed that subscribers and others who regularly read his newspapers had already seen those notices on several occasions.  They could even consult previous editions if they needed more information.  Besides, the season for advertising seeds was coming to an end.  The Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Weekly Mercury did not run any more advertisements for seeds in the following weeks, nor did some of the other newspapers.  Some of the seed sellers discontinued their advertising efforts.  The others began tapering off their notices, placing them in fewer newspapers for the overall effect of seeds having less prominence in the public prints in Boston as April came to a close and May arrived.  The annual ritual completed for 1773, it would begin again the following February.

July 30

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , ,

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

South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (July 30, 1771).

“Carries on the BOOK-BINDING and STATIONARY BUSINESS, in all its Branches.”

The term “classified ads” accurately describes newspaper notices published in later periods, but it misrepresents advertising in eighteenth-century newspapers.  Printers did not “classify” advertisements in the sense of assigning them to categories and then grouping or organizing them to make it easier for readers to navigate their contents.  Instead, advertisements appeared as a hodgepodge fashion, requiring more careful reading to discern their purposes.

Consider, for example, advertisements about enslaved people.  Printers could have readily identified four categories or classifications:  enslaved people for sale, enslaved people wanted to purchase or to hire, “runaways” who liberated themselves, and captured fugitives seeking freedom held in workhouse and jails.  Printers did not cluster such advertisements together on the pages of their newspapers.  Consider the July 30, 1771, edition of the South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal.  It included three advertisements offering rewards for the capture and return of enslaved people who liberated themselves.  One ran near the top of the third column on the third page, another at the top of the second column on the last page, and the final one at the bottom of that column.  Two “Brought to the WORK-HOUSE” advertisements describing Black men also appeared in that issue, one at the bottom of the third column on the third page and the other in the middle of the third column on the last page.  The printer made no effort to classify these advertisements and place them in close proximity.

In some cases, it would have been practically impossible to classify advertisements because advertisers often placed notices with multiple purposes in mind.  When Mary Gordon, “Administratrix to the Estate of Mr. James Gordon,” departed South Carolina “for the Benefit of her Health,” she appointed James Taylor to overseer the estate.  Taylor placed an advertisement to that effect, calling on anyone with outstanding accounts to settle them.  Taylor also used the opportunity to promote his own business, inserting a note that he “carries on the BOOK-BINDING and STATIONARY BUSINESS, in all its Branches, almost opposite the State-House.”  While this advertisement could have been considered an estate notice based on its primary purpose, it also aimed to attract customers for a business unrelated to the estate.  In that regard, it defied classification.

Although it may seem reasonable to describe advertisements in eighteenth-century newspapers as “classified ads,” at least initially, further examination reveals that doing so amounts to a mischaracterization of the contents and organization of those newspapers.  It also writes the history of newspaper advertising backwards, grafting later developments onto the early American press.