Advertisement, as we now know it, originated only a little more than a couple of centuries ago, but it had its anticipation many thousands of years ago. The ancient Jews made announcements by means of public criers; the Greeks added written to oral communications of this sort; the Romans expanded the practice in many ways.
One of the first English printed advertisements was a handbill or poster got out by Caxton in 1480 and reading: "Pyes * * * of Salisbury * * * good and chepe * * * if it please any man spirituel or temporel to bye."
This was not a baker's advertisement. Caxton had printed "Pyes," or clerical rules, telling how the clergy at Salisbury dealt with the changing date of Easter; and, as the clergy could read, he was bold enough to print advertisements of his "Pyes."
For two centuries after it was introduced, printing, which should have boomed advertising, if advertising depended primarily upon printing, had little or no effect upon it. The public had to be reached by the rebus over the shop, the public criers in towns, and by boys in front of stalls calling, "What d'ye lack, master? What d'ye lack?"
Even public notices posted in cathedrals and other frequented places were seldom printed. So few copies were required for the few readers that they were cheaper hand-written.
And even the newspapers, when the civil wars in England in the seventeenth century brought them forth and they began to develop readers, had an extraordinarily small effect in developing advertising.
It is generally held that the first newspaper advertisement, in our modern sense of the word, appeared in April, 1647, in No. 13 of Perfect Occurrences of Every Daie Journall in Parliament and other Moderate Intelligence, and it ran as follows:
A Book applauded by the Clergy of England, called the Divine Right of Church Government, Collected by sundry eminent Ministers in the Citie of London; corrected and augmented in many places, with a brief Reply to certain Queries against the Ministery of England; is printed and published for Joseph Hunscot and Charles Calvert, and are to be sold at the Stationers' Hall and at the Golden Fleece in the Old Change.
Booksellers appear, therefore, to have been the first to take advantage of this then new medium of publicity, and they have continued to avail themselves very liberally of its benefits up to the present day.
The next oldest advertisement that has been located refers to the theft of two horses. It is contained in an early number of an English newspaper called the Impartial Intelligencer, published in the year 1648, and was inserted by a gentleman of Candish, in Suffolk. After this, these notifications are very few and far between for several years, until the era of the London Gazette.
But, although announcements in the nature of advertisements appear in the Gazette almost from the first, the word itself does not occur until No. 42, April 5-9, 1666, when "An Advertisement from the Health Office in London" is addressed to the farmers of the hearth-tax. In No. 62, June 14-18, 1666, the editor inserts the following, which deserves notice as an instance of self-denial that would hardly find a parallel to-day.
An Advertisement--Being daily prest to the Publication of Books, Medecines and other things not properly the business of a Paper of Intelligence, this is to notifie, once and for all, that we will not charge the Gazette with Advertisements, unless they be matter of State; but that a paper of Advertisements will be forthwith printed apart, and recommended to the Publick by another hand.
No copy of this separate sheet has survived, and one can only conjecture what form it took. The good resolutions of the editor were soon broken. Right after the Great Fire in London we find the following in No.94, October 8-11, 1666.
Such as have settled in new Habitations since the late Fire and desire for the convenience of their correspondence to publish the place of their public abode, or to give notice of Goods lost or found, may repair to the Corner House in Bloomsbury on the East Side of the Great Square, before the House of the Right Honourable the Lord Treasurer, where there is care taken for the Receipt and Publication of such Advertisements.
After this date, announcements headed "Advertisements" became common, and it may be taken for granted that the word was first used in this sense by the Lodon Gazette. The earliest use cited in the "New English Dictionary" is considerably later: Luttrell's Brief Relation,, 1692.
When the public crier gave way to newspaper and periodical advertising, certain trades adopted some one organ as the best medium for advertising their special wares. The London Morning Advertiser, for example, became the favorite for liquor dealers, Bell's Life for the theatrical profession.
In the United States the first continuously printed or regular newspaper (q.v.) was the Boston News Letter, first issued Aril 24, 1704. This initial number contained no advertisements, though it announced that, "notices of houses, lands, ships, vessels, or merchandise to be sold or let, or servants run away, or goods stole or lost" would be inserted at rates ranging from twelve-pence to five shillings.
It was a Pennsylvanian who discovered the uses of boardings and fences and who began the new departure by painting on the wooden walls of a graveyard, "Use Jones' Bottle Ale if you would keep out of here." After the humorous inscription came the enigmatic. One man, having a certain brand of plantation bitters to sell, advertised it in all sorts of inaccessible spots under the formula S.T. 1860 X. Much discussion and argument arose over the meaning of these characters, and, when the public had reached a comfortable state of mystifiction, the explanation was made that they stood for "Started Trade in 1860 with Ten Dollars." (See article "Advertising, Quaint and Curious," in WALSH: Handy-book of Literary Curiosities, p. 17.)