Early Western Mercantile Advertising

Extract

Few aspects of business show greater change within the past hundred years than does advertising. The reader accustomed to the advertisements of the modern day is immediately struck, when he starts turning the pages of a pre-Civil War paper, by the deadly uniformity and limited appeal of the earlier advertising technique.

An occasional iconoclast among the earlier merchants only serves to accentuate the impression that a departure from the accepted forms of the period made a business man suspect in the eyes of his associates.