th Oct.
THE actor who accidentally perverted Shakespeare's consolatory line in As You Like It into "Sweet are the uses of advertisement" told unintentionally a great truth. For the uses of advertisement are sweet to all connected with them; it has a quality even superior to that of mercy; it blesseth not only him that gives and him that takes, but the advertiser, the print in which the advertisement appears, and the public, who might not know without it where to get, say, for Is. 1}d. pills worth a guinea a box. It is an art, too, which does not lack its wates sacer; for we have received from Messrs. T. B. Browne, Ld., masters of the practice of advertisement, real MA's, in fact, a handsome and very handsomely illustrated volume of 151 pages, by William Stead, jr, The Avt of Advertising, divided into three parts, The Theory of Advertising, in five chapters; The Practice of Advertising, in six, and the Growth of Press Advertising in four chapters. Dr. Johnson, Joseph Addison, and Lord Macaulay are produced on the fore-page as sponsors for the book. Dr. Johnson's opinion is worth quoting: "The man who first took advantage of the general curiosity that was excited by a siege or a battle to betray the readers of news into the knowledge of the shop where the best puffs and owders were to be sold, was undoubtedly a man of great sagacity, and profound skill in the nature of man." Lord Macaulay's dictum has become a household word: " Adver-rising is to business what steam is to machinery, the grand propelling PoMtn Stead begins by pointing out that the Queen is the best-advertised person in the British Empire; and a picture is given of some of the ways in which royalty is always being advertised, the " Court Circular," the Royal Arms, the coinage, postage-stamps, etc, "And yet there are people who, while honouring the Queen's advertisement, have nothing but haughty contempt for the printers." The peerage and gentry are very angry if their names—their advertisement—are dropped from Burke or Debrett, and every peer pays the Government £2 2s. a year for the right to advertise himself by his coronet on the door of his carriage. They pay the Times for the right to say in the Society column that they have given a dinner-party, or contracted the mumps, or gone to have a flutter at Monte Carlo. All these innocent bits of information in the London papers are advertisements and are paid for as such. The doctor advertises himself by a red lamp, the clergyman announces the subject of his coming sermon; "lawyers are as eager to see their names in print as! is any merchant who desires to make known his goods.... Wherever we look, we see the same thing. Advertising is universal, and must necessarily be so. It has always existed; but it is only in the last decades of the present century that it is being systematized and treated in an intelligent fashion. The instinct of the advertiser is inherent in human nature. It is one of the mainsprings of progress. The day is past when anyone who would interpret correctly the history of past or present times can afford to ignore it. 'The Advertising Agent can no longer be looked upon as the undesirable person it has been the fashion in the past to regard him. By hard work, trained knowledge, and practical' experience he has won for himself an honourable place in the community, He is a specialist in his business, bringing to it an aptitude which is peculiarly his own. He has systematized 2nd realloted a practice which is universal, and is as indispensable to society as it is at present constituted as the lawyer, the doctor, or the chartered accountant." Even Field Marshals are supposed to be not above it; and one of Tommy Atkins's grounds for admiring "Bobs" is that "he doesn't advertise."
Mr. Stead's book is partly an advertisement itself of the house of T. B. Browne, Ld., and they could have hardly issued a better one, for it is mently readable even by those never influenced by an advertisement," or say so. The illustrations give a good idea of the contents. We have: already mentioned the royal advertisements and the doctor's advertisement; then come a Typical Hoarding and a Row of Sandwichmen: facsimiles of two sides of an appreciative post-card from Mr. Gladstone; and we note in passing that Mr. Gladstone used to take in American magazines, because he wanted to read the American advertising. "It interests me," " he said, "as reading; it interests me on account of the high character of illustration, and it is one of my means of gauging the material prosperity of the country" Then we have some excellent reduced specimens of well-known pictorial advertisements, and a long and interesting description of the way in which T. B. Browne, Ld, carry on their business, their enor-metis offices and store rooms and newspaper rooms, and pictures of colonial towns in. whose papers they insert advertisements. The story is told again of Messrs. Pears' acquisition of the "Dirty Boy," and of their subsequent commissions to leading artists. "Pictorial advertising," we are told, "to be effective must be bold, vigorous, and simple. Its object is to attract attention and to strike the public eye. The simpler the picture, the more effective the adver-fisement will be. To crowd it with details is to spoil it. A few strokes of the pen or brash is all that is necessary, but it requires a skilled artist to put meaning into them." We cannot but regard the hypethral picture galleries of the world with more interest than ever when we realise how much thought is embodied in what may seem the simplest designs.
Caxton who brought the printing press to England was, we learn, the first English Press advertiser. He printed and issued the first Press advertisement which appeared upon English soil. It was as follows it please anp man spiritual or tome parel to bye our byes of the or thre comemoracio's of Salisburi use, emprpnte after the form of this present lette, fwhiche ben tod any truly correct, late Hym come to CWlestmonester, into the almonestrye at the reed pole ant he shal Hano them good any chape: Supplico stet cevula Then we have a facsimile of the title page of The Weekly News, the first authentic English periodical newspaper, published on the 23rd of May 1622. Several amusing adver-fisements are taken from the Mercwrius Politicus, which appeared during the Commonwealth, and the Mercurius Publicus, of which the name was changed after the Restoration, Bewildering statistics are given of the publications of the day and the advertisements they contain; and one very interesting fact is noted in the last age of what is a very interesting book; that to be remunerative, advertising must secure regular customers, and this is impossible unless the article advertised is good in itself We may state in conclusion that Mr. Stead's book costs 3s. 6d, and will be sent post-free to China for 5:
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.