About Advertising and Printing: A Concise, Practical, and Original Manual on the Art of Local Advertising
An 1889 Boston manual on local retail advertising by Nathaniel C. Fowler Jr., then manager of advertising and printing at the Pope Manufacturing Co., maker of Columbia bicycles.
What it is
An 1889 Boston manual on local retail advertising by Nathaniel C. Fowler Jr., then manager of advertising and printing at the Pope Manufacturing Co., maker of Columbia bicycles. It opens with general rules: advertising is a distinct art; few ads sell directly, their job is to bring people to the store; bargain and "less than cost" claims are read as lies; and one ad never pays, so run at least three months and keep going through the dull season. A section headed "What?" then goes trade by trade, from coal and confectionery to crockery, giving space, frequency and message for each. Later chapters cover newspaper rates (three to six cents a line in country weeklies), writing, model "puffs" placed as local news, posters and roadside signs, type specimens set in the faces they name, window dressing, sample ads Fowler wrote for real firms, and a printers' glossary.
Why read it now
The core rules hold. Continuity over bursts, and staying visible in the dull season, match modern evidence that brands which go dark lose sales and share over time. His advice to understate value so the buyer is pleasantly surprised is a sound defence against discount language that trains customers to wait for the next sale. Indexing the advice by trade, with a space size and a cadence for each, is a format worth copying for any playbook. What has dated: he tells merchants to keep the firm name small at the foot of the ad, while later research on brand attribution points the other way; and his "puffs", paid messages written to pass as news, would now break ad disclosure rules in most markets, Saudi Arabia included. Rates and type sizes are history only. Use: before a slow month, plan a smaller but unbroken schedule instead of going silent, and write one claim that undersells the product rather than oversells it.
Passages worth keeping
Few advertisements sell goods directly. The burden upon an advertisement is to draw attention to the store, or to the articles there for sale, teaching the first lesson in prospective purchasing.
الإعلان نادرًا ما يبيع بنفسه، ومهمته أن يلفت الانتباه إلى المتجر وبضاعته، فيكون الخطوة الأولى في طريق الشراء.
If the advertisement depart from the truth at all, let it be in underestimating the true value of the goods advertised
إذا ابتعد الإعلان عن الدقة فليكن ذلك بالتقليل من قيمة السلعة لا بالمبالغة فيها، لأن المفاجأة السارة عند الشراء تبني الثقة.
Generally speaking, spasmodic advertising is as silly as spasmodic eating. To expect a single advertisement to pay is as foolish as to hope to grow fat from the spoils of one dinner.
الإعلان المتقطع لا ينفع، وانتظار الربح من إعلان واحد يشبه انتظار السمنة من وجبة واحدة.
Brevity is the soul of advertising, as it is of about everything else.
الإيجاز جوهر الإعلان، فالقارئ لا يقرأ أكثر مما يحتمل.
Puffing, to be worth much of anything, should be indirect.
الفقرة الترويجية المنشورة في صفحة الأخبار لا قيمة لها إلا إذا جاءت غير مباشرة، في صورة خبر لا في صورة مديح صريح.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
What it teaches best
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