Looking Glasses

July 12

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , ,

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

Jul 12 - 7:12:1768 South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal
South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (July 12, 1768).

“At WEYMAN’s Looking-Glass Shop.”

Edward Weyman’s advertisements for his “Looking-Glass Shop in Church-street” in Charleston were easily recognizable when they appeared in the South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal. In addition to using to his surname as a headline, Weyman included an image of a looking glass mounted in an elaborately carved frame. While Weyman’s woodcut certainly was not a sophisticated engraving, the processes of remediating the image over the years – photography and digitization – likely make it appear more crude than it looked to colonists who read the newspaper when it was first published or even to modern researchers who consult original copies in libraries and archives rather than the digital surrogates more widely accessible in the twenty-first century. This process is compounded when printing images from the digital ones, a process that tends to create even darker and denser images. In other words, Weyman’s woodcut may look like a dark mass to modern eyes, but that is contingent in part on the format in which it is presented for our consumption. Eighteenth-century viewers would have seen a crisper image. They would have more easily noticed the lines and details that do not translate well via subsequent remediation. It remains important not to overstate the quality of this and other woodcuts, but at the same time we should avoid denigrating them as excessively crude unnecessarily.

Besides, Weyman’s woodcut served its purpose. Other than the masthead, only three images appeared in the July 12, 1768, edition of the South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal. Two of them were stock images that belonged to the printer: a woodcut of a house that accompanied a real estate advertisement and a woodcut of a slave that accompanied a fugitive advertisement. Weyman’s woodcut of a looking glass was the only one commissioned by the advertiser, the only one used exclusively by a particular advertiser rather than interchangeably in advertisements of the corresponding genre. Weyman advertised frequently, making his woodcut a familiar image to regular readers of the South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal. In effect, it created a logo or a brand that readers could immediately identify. Its mere repetition over weeks and months, especially as an especially distinctive visual element, likely secured a place for Weyman in the minds of readers. Even if they did not need or want looking glasses when they glimpsed his advertisements, they were likely to remember his workshop when they were in the market to make such purchases.

December 30

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

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

dec-30-12301766-south-carolina-gazette-and-country-journal
South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (December 30, 1766).

“Those who … left Breeches to clean, are requested to call for them.”

Most advertisements for consumer goods and services attempted to convince potential customers to make purchases, to participate in the consumer revolution taking place around them. On occasion, however, shopkeepers and artisans placed advertisements requesting that customers actually take possession of the goods that belonged to them. Two such advertisements appeared in the December 30, 1766, issue of the South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal.

In the first, Alexander Caddell, a “Breeches-maker and Glover,” announced that he planned to return to London. He called on business associates and former customers to settle their accounts, but he also informed anyone who “left Skins to be manufactured for Breeches” to retrieve them. Similarly, those who “left Breeches to clean” had two months to pick them up. Otherwise, Caddell planned to sell them.

dec-30-12301766-advert-2-south-carolina-gazette-and-country-journal
South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (December 30, 1766).

In another advertisement, Edward Weyman noted that he had “in his Possession sundry Looking-Glasses belonging to different Persons” who had entrusted him with silvering them. He called on the owners to “pay the Charges” and “take them away.” Like Caddell, he threatened to sell them, though he allowed six months, rather than two, for the owners to recover their property from his shop.

In both cases, the advertisers had provided services but presumably had not yet been paid. Selling items that had been abandoned by their owners, after giving sufficient notice that they planned to do so, became a method for receiving payment for their services through a different means.

This situation also illuminates one of the convoluted routes for delivering goods to consumers. Many eighteenth-century advertisements featured new goods that moved along a simple path from producer to retailer to consumer. The breeches that Caddell threatened to sell and the looking glasses that Weyman threatened to sell, however, did not traverse such a simple trajectory. Instead, these used goods had multiple owners, multiple sellers, and rather complicated provenances. The consumer revolution occurred not only because buyers and sellers valued and exchanged new goods but also because they developed markets for used wares, sometimes as an expediency when the original owners neglected to reclaim possessions left in the care of shopkeepers and artisans.