AMONG THE ADVERTISERS AGAIN.
Can it ever be said that there is nothing in the papers, when advertisers are always to the fore, providing matter for admiration, wonder, amusement, or speculation? One day a gentleman announces the loss of his heart between the stalls and boxes of the Haymarket Theatre; the next, we have ‘R. N.’ telling ‘Dearest E.’—‘If you have the slightest inclination to become first-mate on board the screw-steamer, say so, and I will ask papa;’ and by-and-by we are trying to guess how the necessity arose for the following: ‘St James’s Theatre, Friday.—The Gentleman to whom a Lady offered her hand, apologises for not being able to take it.’
Does any one want two thousand pounds? That nice little sum is to be obtained by merely introducing a certain New-Yorker to ‘the Pontess;’ or if he or she be dead, to his or her heirs. ‘There is a doubt whether the cognomen was, or is, borne by a woman, a man, or a child; if by the last, it must have been born prior to the spring of 1873.’ If the Pontess-seeker fails in his quest from not knowing exactly what it is that he wants, an advertiser in the Times is likely to have the same fortune from knowing, and letting those interested know, exactly what it is that he does not want. Needing the services of a married pair as coachman and cook, this outspoken gentleman stipulates that the latter must not grumble at her mistress being her own housekeeper; nor expect fat joints to be ordered to swell her perquisites; nor be imbued with the idea that because plenty may be around, she is bound to swell the tradesmen’s bills by as much waste as possible. ‘No couple need apply that expect the work to be put out, are fond of change, or who dictate to their employers how much company may be kept.’
When two of a trade fall out, they are apt to disclose secrets which it were wiser to keep to themselves. Disgusted by the success of a rival whose advertising boards bore the representation of a venerable man sitting cross-legged at his work, a San Francisco tailor advertised: ‘Don’t be humbugged by hoary-headed patriarchs who picture themselves cross-legged, and advertise pants made to order, three, four, and five dollars a pair. Do you know how it’s done? When you go into one of these stores that cover up their shop-windows with sample lengths of cassimere, marked “Pants to order, three dollars fifty cents and four dollars;” after you have made a selection of the piece of cloth you want your pants made from, the pompous individual who is chief engineer of the big tailor shears, lays them softly on the smoothest part of his cutting-table, unrolls his tape-line, and proceeds to measure his victim all over the body. The several measurements are all carefully entered in a book by the other humbug. The customer is then told that his pants will be finished in about twenty-four or thirty-six hours; all depends upon how long it takes to shrink the cloth. That’s the end of the first act. Part second.—The customer no sooner leaves the store than the merchant-tailor calls his shopboy Jim, and sends him around to some wholesale jobber, and says: “Get me a pair of pants, pattern thirty-six,” which is the shoddy imitation of the piece of cassimere that your pants are to be made of. “Get thirty-four round the waist, and thirty-three in the leg.” They are pulled out of a pile of a hundred pairs just like them, made by Chinese cheap labour. All the carefully made measurements and other claptrap are the bait on the hook. That’s the way it’s done.’
Traders sometimes give themselves away, as Americans say, innocently enough, a Paris grocer advertising Madeira at two francs, Old Madeira at three francs, and genuine Madeira at ten francs, a bottle. A Bordeaux wine-merchant, after stating the price per cask and bottle of ‘the most varied and superior growths of Bordeaux and Burgundy,’ concludes by announcing that he has also a stock of natural wine to be sold by private treaty. A sacrificing draper funnily tempts ladies to rid him of three hundred baptiste robes by averring ‘they will not last over two days;’ and the proprietor of somebody’s Methuselah Pills can give them no higher praise than, ‘Thousands have taken them, and are living still.’
When continental advertisers, bent upon lightening British purses, rashly adventure to attack Englishmen in their own tongue, the result is often disastrously comical. The proprietor of a ‘milk-cur’ establishment in Aix-la-Chapelle, ‘foundet before twenty years of orders from the magistrat,’ boasts that his quality of ‘Suisse and his experiences causes him to deliver a milk pure and nutritive, obtained by sounds cow’s and by a natural forage.’ One Parisian hosier informs his hoped-for patrons he possesses patent machinery for cutting ‘sirths’—Franco-English, we presume, for shirts. Another proclaims his resolve to sell his wares dirty cheap; and a dealer in butter, eggs, and cheeses, whose ‘produces’ arrive every day ‘from the farms of the establishment without intermedial,’ requests would-be customers to send orders by unpaid letters, as ‘the house does not recognise any traveller.’ A Hamburg firm notifies that their ‘universal binocle of field is also preferable for the use in the field, like in the theatre, and had to the last degree of perfection concerning to rigouressness and pureness of the glass;’ while they are ready to supply all comers with ‘A Glass of Field for the Marine 52ctm opjectiv opening in extra shout lac-leather étui and strap, at sh 35s 6d.’ This is a specimen of their ‘English young man’s’ powers of composition that would justify the enterprising opticians in imitating the Frenchman whose shop-window was graced with a placard, bearing the strange device, ‘English spoken here a few.’
An Italian, speaking French well and a little English, with whom ‘wage is no object,’ advertising in a London paper for an engagement as an indoor servant, puts down his height as ‘fifty-seven feet seven.’ But he manages his little English to better purpose than his countryman of Milan, who offers the bestest comforts to travellers, at his hotel, which he describes as ‘situated in the centre of an immence parck, with most magnificient views of the Alp chain, and an English church residing in the hotel’—the latter being furthermore provided with ‘baths of mineral waters in elegant private cabins and shower rooms, and two basins for bathin’; one for gentlemen, the oter for ladies;’ while it contains a hundred and fifty rooms, ‘all exposed to the south-west dining-groom.’
Such an exposure might well cause the Milanese host’s visitors to become ‘persons dependent upon the headache, or who have copious perspirations,’ whom a M. Lejeune invites ‘to come and visit without buying his new fabrication,’ with the chance of meeting ‘the hat-makers, who endeavour by caoutchouc, gummed linen and others, to prevent hats from becoming dirt;’ eager to hear the inventor of the new fabrication demonstrate ‘how much all those preparations are injurious, and excite, on contrary, to perspiration.’ Equally anxious to attract British custom is a doctor-dentist who, ‘after many years consecrated to serious experiences, has perfected the laying of artificial teeth by wholly new proceedings. He makes himself most difficulty works; it is the best guaranty, and, thanks to his peculiar proceeding, his work joins to elegancy, solidity, and duration.’ Considering all things, our doctor-dentist’s derangement of sentences is quite as commendable as that of the Belfast gentleman desirous of letting ‘the House at present occupied, and since erected by J. H——, Esq.;’ who might pair off with the worthy responsible for—‘To be sold, six cows—No. 1, a beautiful cow, calved eight days, with splendid calf at foot, a good milker; No. 2, a cow to calve in about fourteen days, and great promise. The other two cows are calved about twenty-one days, and will speak for themselves.’
By a fortuitous concurrence of antagonistic lines, the Times one morning gave mothers the startling information that
Joseph Gillott’s Steel Pens
The Best Food for Infants
Is Prepared solely by
Savory and Moore
—a hint as likely to be taken as that of a public benefactor who announced in the Standard: ‘Incredible as it may seem, I have ground to hope that half a glass of cold water, taken immediately after every meal, will be found to be the divinely appointed antidote for every kind of medicine.’
Another benevolent individual kindly tells us how to make coffee:
Placed in the parted straining-top let stand
The moistened coffee, till the grain expand,
Before the fire; then boiling water pour,
And quaff the nectar of the Indian shore.
But he is not quite so generous as he seems, since he is careful to inform us he is in possession of an equally excellent recipe for bringing out the flavour of tea, which he will forward for five shillings-worth of stamps. Urged by an equally uncontrollable desire to serve his fellow-creatures, a ‘magister in palmystery and conditionalist’ offers, with the aid of guardian spirits, to obtain for any one a glimpse at the past and present; and, on certain conditions, of the future; but with less wisdom than a magister of palmystery should display, he winds up with the prosaic notification, ‘Boots and shoes made to order.’
The wants of the majority of advertisers are intelligible enough; but it needs some special knowledge to understand what may be meant by the good people who hanker for a portable mechanic, an efficient handwriter, a peerless feeder, a first-class ventilator on human hair-nets, a practical cutter by measure on ladies’ waists, a youth used to wriggling, and a boy to kick Gordon. Nor is the position required by a respectable young lady as ‘figure in a large establishment,’ altogether clear to our mind; and we may be doing injustice to the newspaper proprietor requiring ‘a sporting compositor,’ by inferring he wants a man clever alike at ‘tips’ and types.
It does not say much for American theatrical ‘combinations,’ that the managers of one of them ostentatiously proclaim: ‘We pay our salaries regularly every Tuesday; by so doing, we avoid lawsuits, are not compelled to constantly change our people, and always carry our watches in our pockets.’ Neither would America appear to be quite such a land of liberty as it is supposed to be, since a gentleman advertises his want of a furnished room where he can have perfect independence; while we have native testimony to our cousins’ curiosity in a quiet young lady desiring a handsome furnished apartment ‘with non-inquisitive parties;’ and a married couple seeking three or four furnished rooms ‘for very light housekeeping, where people are not inquisitive.’ Can it be the same pair who want a competent Protestant girl ‘to take entire charge of a bottled baby?’ If so, their anxiety to abide with non-curious folk is easily comprehended.
Very whimsical desires find expression in the advertising columns of the day. A lady of companionable habits, wishing to meet with a lady or gentleman requiring a companion, would prefer to act as such to ‘one who, from circumstances, is compelled to lead a retired life.’ A stylish and elegant widow, a good singer and musician, possessing energy, business knowledge, and means of her own, ready, ‘for the sake of a social home,’ to undertake the supervision of a widower’s establishment, thinks it well to add, goodness knows why, ‘a Radical preferred.’ Somebody in search of a middle-aged man willing to travel, stipulates for a misanthrope with bitter experience of the wickedness of mankind; displaying as pleasant a taste as the proprietor of a wonderful discovery for relieving pain and curing disease without medicine, who wants a partner in the shape of a consumptive or asthmatical gentleman.
Your jocular man, lacking an outlet for his wit, will often pay for the privilege of airing his humour in public. Here are a few examples. ‘Wanted, a good Liberal candidate for the Kilmarnock Burghs. Several inferior ones given in exchange.’—‘Wanted a Thin Man who has been used to collecting debts, to crawl through keyholes and find debtors who are never at home. Salary, nothing the first year; to be doubled each year afterwards.’—‘Wanted, Twelve-feet planks at the corners of all the streets in Melbourne, until the Corporation can find some other means of crossing the metropolitan creeks. The planks and the Corporation may be tied up to the lamp-posts in the dry weather.’—‘Wanted, a Cultured Gentleman used to milking goats; a University man preferred.’—‘Correspondence is solicited from Bearded Ladies, Circassians, and other female curiosities, who, in return for a true heart and devoted husband, would travel during the summer months, and allow him to take the money at the door.’—‘Wanted, a Coachman, the ugliest in the city; he must not, however, have a moustache nor red hair, as those are very taking qualities in certain households at present. As he will not be required to take care of his employer’s daughter, and is simply engaged to see to the horses, he will only be allowed twenty dollars per month.’
A great deal might be said about pictorial advertisements, if the impossibility of reproducing them did not stand in the way. As it is, we must content ourselves with showing how an advertisement can be illustrated without the help of draughtsman or engraver. By arranging ordinary printers’ types thus:
an ingenious advertising agent presents the public with portraits of the man who does not and the man who does advertise, and says: ‘Try it, and see how you will look yourself.’