What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago today?
“They neatly engrave: Shop Bills; Bills of Exchange; Bills of Lading.”
When John Norman, “ARCHITECT and LANDSCAPE-ENGRAVER, from London,” arrived in Philadelphia in May 1774, he introduced himself to prospective clients via an advertisement in the Pennsylvania Journal. A few months later, he once again took to the pages of that publication, this time to announce that the partnership of Norman and Ward, “ENGRAVERS and DRAWING-MASTERS,” had opened a shop where they engraved a variety of items and sold “an assortment of Pictures and Frames … much cheaper than imported.” In addition, they established “an Evening Drawing School” for teaching “that most noble and polite Art in all its various and useful Branches.” Still a newcomer in the city, Norman devised multiple ways to earn his livelihood.
The various kinds of engraving that Norman and Ward proposed testified to the prevalence of advertising in early America, especially in urban ports. They indicated that they could produce all sorts of items but could not list them all because they were “too tedious to mention in an Advertisement.” Yet they named more than a dozen kinds of engraved items, leading their list with “Shop Bills.” They likely meant both trade cards with an engraved image that filled the entire sheet and billheads that featured an engraved image at the top and blank space for recording purchases. On occasion, merchants, shopkeepers, and artisans wrote receipts on the reverse side of trade cards. Norman and Ward next named “Bills of Exchange; Bills of Lading; [and] Bills of Parcels.” Those could have been simple printed blanks, but that would have defeated the purpose of ordering them from an engraver rather than acquiring those common business forms from printers who produced them in volume. In this instance, the bills of exchange, bills of lading, and bills of parcels likely included engraved images, not solely text, that served as advertisements for the merchants who ordered them. Later in the list, Norman and Ward considered “Devices for News-Papers” important enough to include rather than “too tedious to mention.” Presumably they produced woodcuts in additional to copperplate engravings. In addition to newspaper printers seeking images to adorn their mastheads and stock images for use elsewhere, the engravers offered their services to advertisers who desired unique images that represented their businesses exclusively. Trade cards, billheads, and other advertising ephemera have not survived in the numbers that they were likely produced and circulated in early America, yet Norman and Ward’s advertisement suggests that they were part of everyday life as colonizers engaged in commerce and participated in consumer culture.
