Advertising

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 2, 24 March 1927, Page 13 (Supplement)

Advertising

Ancient History gTRANGE as it may seem, journalists advertised their own work long before they realised that by selling a space in their productions to people who had wants to make public they could gain enough money to pay the cost of printing. With the invention of printing there came an outcrop of small handbills which were distributed in the streets, or pasted on church doors or on the posts separating, in place of kerbstones, the side walks from the carriage ways. Montaigne, emperor of French essayists, was the first to inspire advertising. In 1594 he made a suggestion for the establishment of a “registry office,” a precursor of the “want ad.” columns of the modern newspaper. In his essay “Of a Defect on our Policies” Montaigne describes how his “whilom father” had “much desired to bring in this custom. That in all cities there should be a certain appointed place * to which whosoever should have need of anything might come and cause his business to be registered by some officer appointed for that purpose; as, for example, if one have pearls to sell, he should say, I seek to sell some pearls; and another, I seek to buy some pearls. Such a man would fain have company to travel to Paris. Such a one enquireth for a servant of this or that quality. Such a one seeketh for a master, another for a workman; some this, some that, everyone as he needeth; and it seemeth that his means of enter-warning one another would bring no small commodity into common commerce and society.” To the popularity of Montaigne’s essays in England, through Florio’s translations, must be ascribed the putting of the idea into practice. In 1611 Sir Arthur Gorges and Sir Walter Cope, gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, received letters patent from James I. for the erection of an office to be called “The Publique Register re. ylx 7ii tc 7,i tk 7\x t’c. rH

for General Commerce.” There was to be . nothing restricted about their business, every ; known want and offer was to be entered oii A their bookstand they even contemplated bank-ing-houses with branch offices in the country to prevent losses by highwaymen on journeys to London. This was a business's risk of the “good old days.” The trouble was that “The Publique Register” relied on the public conscience—a rather unsteady foundation even in these enlightened times; its patent stipulated that no man was to pay “any more for search or entry than shall please himself!” The clause was so much to the L :ing of the clientele that the patentees terminated their venture at the end of the first year. So endeu the flutter of the first advertising firm. The first advertisement recorded in an English periodical was to give publicity to a book on the marriages of the Royal houses of England and France, and so strange was the medium that the sale of book was a failure. On February 1, 1625, there was published, in Thomas Archer’s “Mercurius Britannicus,” this paragraph apropos of the “Epithalamium Gallobritannicum” of George Marcelline: “Here** is this present day published an excellent discourse concerning the * match between our most Gracious and Mightie Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, and the Lady Henrette Maria, daughter of Henry the Fourth, late King of France, etc., sister of Lewis the Thirteenth, now King of these dominions. Manifesting the Royal ancestors of both these famous princes and truly explaining the several interchanges of marriages which hath been between France and England. With the lively picture of the Prince and Lady cut in brasse.” Despite the attraction of the brazen pair the volur "Mled to sell and so discouraged advertise . > '■'the* can be nd in the records iu. j 47, when another book was put forward. On December 13, 1637, Captain Robert Innes obtained letters patent from Charles I. for a similar office, but he was still hampered by the ridiculous provision that he was to receive “such recompense as the parties pleased.” Innes died for the Royalist cause and the patent lay dormant until 1657. Meanwhile, the advertising of a book in “Perfect Occurrences” on April 2, 1647, had brought increased sales and gradually advertisements crept into the periodicals of the day. Readers were incensed at the waste of space, and in 1652 Sneppard wrote: “They have now found out another quaint device in their trading. There is never a mountebank who either by professing chymistry or any other art drains money from the people of the nation, but these arch cheats (the news writers f have a share in the booty, and besides filling up of his paper which he knew not how to do otherwise, he must have a feeling to

authorise the charlatan, rorsooth, by putting him in the newsbook.” Suppression, in 1657, of the whole of the

licensed press by Cromwell prompted Marchamont Nedham, the official journalist, and some friends to run the first periodical containing only “advices,” as the advertisements were then called. “The Public Adviser’s” fees were heavy and they were not calculated on the length of entry. Some persons were charged according to their station in life; for example, physicians paid ten shillings and workmen four shillings, while advertisements about books cost five shillings. For ships leaving port a fee of one penny per ton on the tonnage of the ship was

charged. Lands to be sold or let were charged at the rate of one penny per pound in value or rent with a minimum fee of five shillings. Here is a delightful “advice” from the pamphlet of May, 1657: “In Bartholomew Lane, on the back side of the Old Exchange, the drink called coffee, which is a very wholesome and physical drink, having many excellent virtues, closes the orifice of the stomach, fortifies the heat within, helpeth digestion, quickeneth the _ spirits; maketh the heart lightsom, is good against eye sore, coughs or colds, rhumes, consumptions, headache, dropsie, gout, scurvy, King’s evil, and many others; is to be sold

both in the morning and at three of the clock in the afternoon.” This marlts the introduction #f coffee-houses.

By purchasing the unexpired term of Captain Innes’s patent a gunsmith named Oliver Williams considered he was justified in issuing a “prohibition to all persons who have set up any offices called by the name of ‘Addresses,’ ‘Publique Advice,’ or ‘lntelligence.’ ” When Nedham fled before the return of Charles 11. in 1660, Williams stole the titles of the for-

mer's derelict periodicals, and issued them from his office at the Old Exchange. Williams’s

ambitions were undermined by the granting, to Sir Roger L’Estrange in 1663, the patent of “Surveyor of the Press,” which carried with it the sole right of writing, printing and publishing all advertisements. Accordingly, the erstwhile gunsmith opened a coffee-house at the back of the Old Exchange and it became a resort of the disaffected. The “London Gazette” in 1666, which was “half a sheet in folio,” affected to scorn advertisements as not being part of “a paper of intelligence,” but after the appearance of several advertising periodicals it allowed part of its space to be sold. In 1675 we find that Williams comes out of his retirement with his “City MercurjV’ which proclaimed that “the office or place where any person may have his

desires answered in anything hereby advertised is kept in St. Michael’s Alley, in Cornhill, London . . .”

An important innovation came in 1681 when James Whiston, a merchant's broker, commenced his “Merchants’ Remembrancer,” a list of the current prices of merchandise of all kinds. In 1692 an even more important periodical appeared. This was the “Collection for Im-provement of Husbandry and Trade,” edited by John Houghton, F.R.S. It existed until 1702 and contained a large number of advertisements. Explaining the scope of his business, Houghton said in one of his' own advertisements: “I sell chocolate made of the best nuts without spice or perfume/ and with vinelloes or spice, and I know them to be a great helper of weak stomachs ... I also sell

German spaw water or sago. . . I strive to help masters to clerks ... I know of several estates to be sold . .

By these steps the new medium of advertising became popular, and at the end of the 17th century advertisements had become general in the newspapers.