Foreword by Richard Roberts

With the archive having decided to sign up for the Heritage Open Day initiative 2021 I agreed to put on a talk during the day and picked the above title as a means of showcasing examples from the archive. I didn’t want to just do a slide show and talk so pulled examples from the stacks, put markers in them for the talk and stacked the volumes and magazines in the reading room praying that I used them in the correct order. Thankfully on the day all went well and I had a great time with my very engaging audience. This piece summarises my talk but also includes a few additional items I have since found that add to the article.

There are many factors that influence the style and type of artwork in advertising (literacy levels, paper taxes, transportation etc) but I approached the topic from the simple view of technological changes. In addition I have limited the scope of the talk to the date range of items we hold in our collection.

Part one: the early years.

The oldest advert we have is in the bound volume of the “Illustrated London News” for 1846 (Figs. 1 and 2). Inspection of this page shows that all the adverts here are based on simple text.

A caveat to this is that I do not know if these early periodicals had throw away advertising covers (see later 1893 loose copy example of “The Graphic” as shown in Figs. 3 and 4). As was common, indeed expected, when you sent your weekly magazines away for binding at the end of the year the advertising (unless attached to editorial pages) was thrown away.

Our first example of pictorial advertising appears in 1854 in an American publication called “American Portrait Gallery” (Figs. 5 to 11). This publication is a typical example of a book being funded by adverts and in fact is one of the best examples I have ever seen. The adverts, all for businesses in New York, feature products or premises and are all appear to be steel plate engravings due to the intricate detail found in the engravings.

The background on engravings goes back over a thousand years and first emerged in the Far East in the form of plank engraving where the engraving was made along the grain of the wood. The advantage of this process was that the wood was easy to work but its durability when used for printing was limited. This process appeared in Europe around 1400 when, at about the same time copper-plate engraving appeared. An improvement on copper plate was steel or copper coated with a layer of steel which was harder to work but much more durable. An even later development in the 1870’s by Thomas Beswick was using the end-grain of wood (English Boxwood was found to be one of the best woods).

Timeline:

• c. 1000 - wood engraving (plank, easy to work but not durable, fine quality not achievable)

• c. 1400 – copper plate engraving (fine quality, easy to work but not durable)

• c. 1821-c. 1830 – mix of copper or steel plates used.

• Post-1830 – almost certainly steel or steel-faced plates used for printing (fine quality, harder to work but very durable).

• c. 1870 – end grain wood engraving (fine quality, harder to work but durable).

Our first English/Welsh example of illustrated advertising comes from Slater’s Royal National Commercial Directory of 1868. It can be noted from Fig.12 that the maps within the directory are “ENGRAVED ON STEEL” and one can assume that given the quality of the other engravings in the directory that they too are done in the same way.

Examples of the engravers art from this directory can be seen in Figs 13 to 15. One interesting point is that if you look at the typefaces used it looks to have been at the printers discretion which font to use and indeed there are a myriad of different ones in use here. Corporate branding is still to make itself known.

Join me next month for the second part of our journey through the changing face of printed advertising. We will be focusing on the innovations in advertising brought about by the progress of photographic printing.

Until then, thank you for reading along.

Richard Roberts