What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?
“A dictionary, explaining the most difficult terms made use of in fortification, gunnery, and the whole compass of the military art.”
It was one of the first mentions of an almanac for 1776 in an American newspaper. The initial notices usually began appearing sometime in August, scattered here and there in different newspapers, and then more printers advertised almanacs for the coming year during the fall. The number and frequency of advertisements accelerated each year as printers engaged in fierce competition to market and sell the popular reference manuals.
Benjamin Towne, the printer of the Pennsylvania Evening Post, inserted a notice about an almanac for 1776 in the August 24, 1775, edition of his newspaper, making him one of the first that year. “In the press, and shortly will be published, by the Printer of this paper,” he announced, “The CONSTITUTIONAL ALMANACK.” The notice appeared immediately after news from the Second Continental Congress, but without the usual line to separate it from other content. An advertisement offering a reward for a runaway indenture servant ran below the notice about the almanac, a horizontal line demarcating where one ended and the other began. Similar lines separated the advertisements on the final page of that edition. Towne resorted to a tactic sometimes deployed by printers when they promoted their own work, placing his notice ahead of any of the paid advertisements and adopting a format that made it look like a news item. Even if readers did not peruse all the advertisements, they likely read Towne’s notice about his almanac and then realized that they had reached the end of the news.
The printer’s notice included information that he considered newsworthy. “As a dictionary, explaining the most difficult terms made use of in fortification, gunnery, and the whole compass of the military art, will be subjoined,” Towne declared, “it is presumed this Almanack will be considered a valuable VADE MECUM at this important juncture.” Prospective customers would benefit from treating the combined almanac and dictionary as a handbook kept constantly at the ready for consultation as more news about the siege of Boston reached them and especially if the news included accounts of new encounters between British regulars and American soldiers. Following the battles at Lexington and Concord in April and the Battle of Bunker Hill in June, colonizers did not know when they might need to consult a dictionary of “fortification, gunnery, and the whole compass of the military art” to understand the news they read or heard. The dictionary that accompanied it certainly distinguished Towne’s almanac from others published in the past.