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CHAPTER 1
Advertising
One of the great untold stories of the efflorescence of print culture is the coincident expansion of print advertising. A wealth of evidence, both statistical and anecdotal, illustrates how, over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, advertising moved from the periphery to the center of retail economies (Mason 2013, 11–22). The period witnessed impressive multimedia advertising campaigns, waged in a variety of innovative formats, most of which became more widespread, diverse, and inventive over time. Stretching back to printed advertisements in seventeenth-century chapbooks and newspapers [EPHEMERALITY], the links between commercial advertising and print provide their own history of intermediality. Alongside the late seventeenth-century explosion of trade notices in periodicals, pamphlets, and broadsides, the English word advertising shifted from denoting "warning" and "advising" to its modern commercialized meaning. Not surprisingly, as commercial life developed, so did the use of advertising as a means of promoting sales and public notoriety.
In Byron's London and Balzac's Paris, discarded handbills littered the streets, posters covered seemingly every blank wall, and brand names were chalked on walls in foot-high letters. By the 1820s, advertising vans or carts had become a prominent feature of the streets of large cities, sometimes moving in organized processions (Strachan 16–18; Thornton 2009, 4–11; Mason 2013, 50–62). The notion of the roving advertisement may have originated with the practice of self-promotion through perambulation, such as practiced by the English dentist Martin von Butchell, who made it "his custom to ride on a white pony which he sometimes painted all purple and sometimes with spots" to promote himself and his medical practice (McKendrick 93). From their earliest appearances in London in 1829, omnibuses bore advertisements on their outer panels (Strachan 18), and by 1844, in "Advertising Considered as an Art," Chambers' Edinburgh Journal could report the ubiquity of "Men, looking like animated sandwiches — squeezed in as they are between two boards, conspicuously inscribed with huge invitations to 'Try Potts's pills'" (401). These "direct" forms of publicity were joined by "indirect" forms, such as obtaining puffs in influential newspapers, cultivating endorsements from celebrities or other public figures, and encouraging word-of-mouth recommendations (Mason 2013, 23–49).
The sophistication, inventiveness, and variety of these promotional strategies were partly an outgrowth of the high taxes levied on newspaper advertisements through the British Stamp Act of 1712, which prompted advertisers to look for cheaper vehicles to carry their message. Even so, the rapid and extensive circulation of print made it the medium of choice, as attested by the exponential increase in print advertising over the course of the eighteenth century. According to post–Stamp Act tax records, the annual number of taxed advertisements rose from 18,220 in 1713 to 125,000 in 1750 and 500,000 in 1800 (Nevett 26–27; compare Raven 2003, 26). As a result of the flood of new advertising revenue, British newspapers that long had relied on government subsidies grew increasingly independent and, in some cases, highly profitable (Asquith 1978, 111; see also Asquith 1975, 721). On the continent, some newspapers had similar success stories, as in the case of the Vossische Zeitung, a German paper that in 1795 was able to cover its printing costs, editor's salary, and censor's fees out of advertising revenues (Groth 371).
Not only was print a preferred medium for advertising, but printed books vied with patent medicines as the mostly heavily advertised consumer products of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Long before this time, however, European publishers had exploited their control of presses to print advertisements for their own books. The first printed advertisement in British history, for instance, is widely acknowledged to be William Caxton's 1477 handbill for The Pyes of Salisbury, a book he both printed and sold in his shop (Eisenstein 60). Because of such dynamics, literary advertising offers an interesting case of "interactions with prints" within print itself. The detailed book advertisements found in most newspapers — which routinely included descriptions of the book's size, paper, images, and binding — often functioned as readers' initial mode of "interaction" with the new titles, thus creating anticipation and expectations on their part [CATALOGS]. Particularly noteworthy books were frequently announced via large-scale newspaper advertising campaigns, such as that for Byron's Don Juan, the pending release of which was heralded in a series of "trailer" advertisements designed to whet readers' appetites (Mozer 248). Book advertising also occurred within books themselves, as many volumes ended with advertising leaves listing other titles by the same author or publisher. Largely unintentionally, the censorship culture of ancien régime France generated a different sort of intratextual advertisement, as every bound book included carefully chosen excerpts from the approving censor's report required for a title to receive the print privilège (Darnton 1979, 27–28).
Considering this narrative of advertising's rise and its impact on the publishing industry, it is surprising how little it factors into traditional accounts of European print culture. To a large degree this might be explained by how, owing to the uneven development of European economies and political systems during the early industrial age, advertising played widely divergent roles in the rise of reading publics and book industries across Europe. As we have seen, advertising significantly affected the emergent print culture of eighteenth-century Britain, but the dynamics in France were dramatically different. Before the 1790s, the rigid system of French guilds prohibited most kinds of self-promotion by means of handbills, broadsides, or print advertisements (Todd 518–19). In the seventeenth century, only one publisher, Théophraste Renaudot, had the sole privilège to print advertisements, and he was only to disseminate these through his Feuille du Bureau d'Adresses. And, whereas Samuel Johnson could complain that in 1750s London "advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused," across the channel the loosely connected news sheets known as Affiches, or wall posters, were attempting to jump-start newspaper advertising in France after the previous century had seen several failed attempts to do so. By 1789, forty-four French towns had their own Affiches, but with an average circulation of between 200 and 750, the readership for their advertisements paled in comparison to those for the leading British papers (Jones 1998, 17–18).
A second difficulty in drawing generalizations about advertising's connection to European print cultures is pinning down what exactly counts, since printed advertisements were by no means a stable generic category during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Consider the diversity of printed matter that was labeled "advertisement": single-sheet broadsides and handbills; want ads in newspapers; lists of books recently published in periodicals or tipped into books; the authorial or editorial advertisements that explained, disclaimed, or justified the content of a book; and even directions for the book binder.
Both the nationally specific contexts for advertising's development and the generic diversity of advertisements invite the essay that follows, which attempts to rethink the instrumentality of advertising and how people (publishers, booksellers, authors, and readers) interacted with these materials. As we detail later, advertisements seek to disguise their blunt (and often distasteful) instrumentality by claiming to be simple descriptions, working across media to imaginatively engage their audiences, and borrowing seemingly innocuous material and turning it to the purposes of publicity. Advertisements thus forward the economic ends of their producers by functioning within three related systems: an economy of information, an economy of consumption, and an economy of attention.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this three-pronged attack was fueled by increased competition between producers and their products, a condition that was transferred onto the reader or viewer. As we argue, the way people consumed print advertisements might produce collectives with similar tastes or beliefs, but these communities were founded on notions of their distinctiveness, and thus set out to distinguish themselves from those who were allegedly less refined, educated, or moral. Authors, publishers, and reviewers operating in this system often pitted different kinds of advertising against one another, with the result that the collectives forged by advertisement thus often exposed, or produced, factions within an imaginary reading public. Advertising was thus a stage on which debates about the credibility of print were acted out, and the dupe who believed everything he or she had read in print became a ready-made stand-in for any particular group that was being satirized. At the same time, then, as famous advertisements were becoming crucial points of communal experience within the emerging public sphere, advertising itself functioned as yet another mechanism for social differentiation.
Instrumentality
However covertly at times, most print is "instrumental" insofar as its reason for being is to make something happen in the world. Religious print aims to bring about spiritual and behavioral change (to convert, to comfort, to arrest backsliding, to assuage doubt); literary print attempts to please, to persuade, to move, to make the long hours pass more quickly; and, of course, the blank printed forms and ledgers of commerce and government exist to facilitate trade, tax collection, and the promulgation and enforcement of the law. Direct advertising, however, wears its instrumentality on its sleeve to an unusual degree, in large part because it combines the unabashed functionality of commercial instruments with the persuasive blandishments of rhetoric. As such, it can serve as a sort of limit case that lays bare the instrumentality of print more generally.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as now, readers generally preferred "the soft sell," where seemingly neutral descriptions solicit readers to open their wallets. Consider, for example, a handbill from 1760s London that was designed to draw visitors to Mrs. Salmon's Royal Wax-Work in Fleet-street (fig. 1.1). This is essentially a simple catalog of wax figures to be seen at Mrs. Salmon's establishment. While various glowing adjectives are scattered about, they mostly describe the historical or literary characters being represented rather than the waxworks per se. Hence it is Andromeda who is "fair," the marriage of Henry VII and Elizabeth Tudor that is "happy," the King of Prussia who is "most excellent." It is only at the end that the laudatory language shifts to Mrs. Salmon herself, whose skills come in for commendation with "the lively Representation of Campbell the dumb Fortune-teller, which nothing but Life can exceed." And it is only after this that the admission price is mentioned, as if a mere formality that no one who appreciates the national and religious icons on display could possibly think twice about paying.
Compared to this handbill, the German periodical Journal des Luxus und der Moden (1786–1829) features similarly plain and functional descriptions of a range of objects from the realms of fashion and luxury, complemented by several detailed color engravings in the main content pages. The accompanying Intelligenz-Blatt employed the genre of announcements to present extensive descriptions and lists of objects of consumption. It included where and usually at what cost the advertised product could be purchased, although it mainly created a desire for consumption of objects as part of a virtual community of taste. All the printed products were either luxury items (wallpaper, paper for bindings, binding products, writing and drawing paper, and engravings) or related to fashion (the publisher's fashion calendar, an Italian fashion magazine, and the journal itself). While the Intelligenz-Blatt in 1786 primarily focused on luxury objects or fashionable accessories and mentioned very few print products, that content shifted later to advertisements of collected works and then to advertisements for a wide range of print publications. For the German periodical, this combination of periodical- and market-specific advertising was new and legitimized by the newly laudatory discourses of luxury (Borchert 76–79). The publisher thus encouraged the commercialization process through the provision of information about local productions to a broad transregional public.
The instrumental and commercial nature of book advertising in France remained ambiguous throughout the eighteenth century. In theory, French book advertisements of this era set out to provide only such bibliographical information as the title, size, type of paper, binding, and typography. Because these advertisements were deemed a public service, they appeared free of charge in Journal de la Librairie, a weekly periodical that ran from 1763 to 1789. But many French book advertisements also provided information that was essentially commercial in nature, such as the book's price and where it could be purchased. In considering how booksellers and authors used Journal de la Librairie, we can discern the tension between purportedly "informative" and "commercial" advertising.
As the ban on any "spirit of competition" imposed by the guild system was fading at the end of the ancien régime, booksellers began employing various innovative marketing strategies to stimulate sales. Charles-Joseph Panckoucke (1736–1798), often considered the original "modern publisher" in France, quickly saw the commercial potential of advertising and was the first to charge a fee to those wishing to advertise in his newspapers (Feyel 2003, 843). Yet even though Panckoucke had provided an opening, most booksellers were so unaccustomed to advertising logic that they failed to include details on their books' prices, distinctive features, and other potential selling points. In fact, so short on details were most notices that several subscribers actually complained about how the adverts failed to mention even so much as a price. That Panckoucke himself realized the danger of any appearance of puffery or self-promotion is evidenced in his admonition to would-be advertisers in his Mercure de France: "It is indecent of publishers and authors to praise their own books. One must only make them known" (Todd 532).
While Panckoucke, his readers, and those wishing to advertise in his papers struggled to grasp advertising's unstable functions in their historical and national milieu, questions of instrumentality also troubled English printers contemplating the proper medium for this rhetorical mode. Sometimes, as with eighteenth-century English medley prints — works that advertised the engraver's skill and the printseller's wares via trompe-l'oeil replication of a diverse array of printed images and texts — the power of the advertisement was grounded in a reflexive relationship between the object for sale and the medium of representation (Hallett).
In other cases, however, intermediality was central to the instrumentality of advertising. This was particularly apparent in the case of shop signs, which were regularly reproduced as trade cards to be given to customers. In their static and mobile formulations, these images thus fixed the location of commercial premises in a particular place and time and operated as ciphers for the circulation of goods, money, and people (Garrioch). Furthermore, as Richard Wrigley has shown, sign painting in eighteenth-century Paris operated in tension with academic art practices, as fine art and advertising frequently overlapped (Wrigley). Eighteenth-century French artists including Chardin and, most famously, Watteau, with his L'enseigne de Gersaint of 1720–1721, regularly painted shop signs. Watteau's image of customers viewing paintings piled high in Edme-François Gersaint's shop on the Pont Notre-Dame simultaneously blurred the lines between advertising and fine art and called attention to the status of art as yet another type of commodity. Gersaint shifted his business from fine art to dealing in luxury goods in the 1730s. As a prominent marchand-mercier, he was the first in France to realize the potential of public auctions and the only dealer outside the trade in prints to advertise extensively in the press (McClellan 445). From the 1740s, his primary mode of publicity was the sales catalog, which pioneered the construction of the dealer as type, provided an archetype for connoisseurship, and effectively mediated the language of art criticism for an art-buying public [CATALOGS]. Ascending the social ladder (much like the dealer whose shop it advertised) and swiftly becoming assimilated into the artistic canon, Watteau's painting was reproduced in an engraving by Pierre Aveline in 1732, thus reentering the market as an advertisement for the painting's aesthetic value.
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Excerpted from "Interacting with Print"
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