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

“Printed proposals, with conditions and a specimen of the work, are given gratis.”

Robert Bell, one of the most significant publishers and booksellers of the eighteenth century, frequently ran advertisements in newspapers and disseminated subscription proposals, book catalogues, and other marketing media.  At the beginning of 1775, he promoted an “AMERICAN EDITION of LECTURES on the MATERIA MEDICA, as delivered by WILLIAM CULLEN, M.D. Professor of Medicine in the University of Edinburgh.”  Yet Bell supposedly did not envision this project on his own.  He pursued it, he declared, “At the desire of several PHYSICIANS.”  Given the initial interest expressed by “Gentlemen of that Profession,” Bell inserted an advertisement in the Pennsylvania Gazette in hopes of generating additional demand and determining the viability of publishing an American edition of the influential text.

To that end, he invited physicians and others to obtain “Printed proposals, with conditions and a specimen of the work” at his shop.  Those proposals may have taken the form of a handbill or a short pamphlet, similar to the proposals for A Dissent from the Church of England and the proposals for The Catholic Christian Instructed that Bell disseminated in 1774.  The latter pamphlet devoted two pages to a prospectus that described the purpose of the work, a page to “Conditions” for subscribing (such as number of pages, cost, and payment schedule), and a page to a “Specimen of the type” that demonstrated the quality of an important material aspect of the book.  Based on the description of the printed proposals in Bell’s newspaper advertisement, the proposals for Cullen’s Materia Medica likely had a similar format.

Bell called on “gentlemen, who are desirous of encouraging improvements in the divine art of healing,” to submit their name “speedily” so the book “may be carried into execution immediately.”  He warned against dallying and assuming that surplus copies would be offered for sale after the work went to press: “it will be printed only for those who possess so much animation as to encourage the work by their subscription.”  In other words, anyone who desired copies of this American edition of Cullen’s Materia Medica had only a limited time to pre-order them.  When Bell published the book in 1775, the imprint stated, “Printed for the SUBSCRIBERS,” though perhaps the savvy bookseller produced a small quantity of additional copies to sell to those who neglected to subscribe.  Yet there was no guarantee that he would do so.  Bell attempted to leverage scarcity of the proposed work to encourage customers to reserve copies in advance.