5 - Advertisements, Life-Writing and Scrapbooks

Summary

It is a most excellent thing that in England the remaining space in the news-sheets is not filled with lies (as it is in Germany), but with all kinds of advertisements; not a single journal is printed where one does not find notices of sales as well as of common wares and also books, coins, instruments, furniture, etc.; they also advertise there if something has been stolen or lost, or if apprentices have run away from their masters, or servants from their employers, which happens so frequently that it annoys a great many people to read the advertisements; for they are too much concerned with trifles. The plays that are being given are also announced there, or any curious thing that is to be seen.

In his travels to England in 1710 the German virtuoso, Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, was sometimes sharply critical of London’s attractions, manners and curiosity collections, which were too often ‘not kept clean’ and stored in ‘prodigious confusion’. One thing he evidently appreciated, though, was London’s print culture. In the late seventeenth century, the use of printed advertisements became a common commercial practice: both as separate handbills and within newspapers (a key source of profit for their publishers). Uffenbach was observing what historians describe as an ‘unprecedented’ increase in the production and consumption of printed ephemera, whose impact has been compared to the introduction of the printing press itself. In terms of news and comment serials, in the year of Uffenbach’s travels there were nineteen titles producing 2,300 issues (with print runs from anywhere between a few hundred to a few thousand), risen from 367 issues produced by sixty-four titles during the turbulent year of 1642. One relatively unstudied aspect of this intensified print culture is the proliferation of ‘jobbing work’: small pieces such as notices, receipts or ‘blanks’ (forms with space for hand-written details) that could be printed in-between longer, capital-intensive book projects, providing an income that ‘floated’ the printing industry. While these ‘minor transient documents of everyday life’ performed a range of social, political, legal and commercial functions, their significance is only starting to be appreciated by historians.