What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago today?
“Booksellers, in any part of America, may be supplied with frontispieces of any kind.”
When John Norman, an “ARCHITECT and LANDSCAPE-ENGRAVER, from London,” arrived in Philadelphia in the spring of 1774, he introduced himself to the public with an advertisement in the May 11 edition of the Pennsylvania Journal. He offered his services to “Any Gentlemen, who please to favour him their commands,” promising that they “may depend on having their work carefully and expeditiously executed on the lowest terms and in the best manner.” The newcomer promised quality engravings at the best prices. In addition to local customers, he also sought clients in other cities and towns. In a nota bene, he addressed “Booksellers, in any part of America,” informing them that they “may be supplied with frontispieces of any kind.” He produced such work “as reasonable as in England,” while also pledging to meet the schedules of his clients. For those marketing books with frontispieces by subscription, Norman would invest “great care … to dispatch [the engravings] at the time they are wanted.”
Norman experienced success, first in Philadelphia and later in Boston. He eventually became “one of the significant cartographic engravers and publishers of the early Republic.” In 1775, he published an American edition of Abraham Swan’s The British Architect: or, the Builder’s Treasury of Staircases, printed by Robert Bell. The copies in the collections of the American Antiquarian Society and the Library of Congress have two subscription proposals and a list of “ENCOURAGERS” (or subscribers) bound into them. The engraver hoped that after recruiting nearly two hundred subscribers for The British Architect that the “generous ARTISTS, who encouraged this AMERICAN EDITION, and all others who wish to see useful and ornamental ARCHITECTURE flourish in AMERICA” would reserve one or more copies of “THE GENTLEMAN AND CABINET-MAKERS’S ASSISTANT” and “A COLLECTION OF DESIGNS IN ARCHITECTURE.” For both volumes, “SUBSCRIPTIONS are gratefully received” by Norman and Bell in Philadelphia and local agents in Annapolis, Baltimore, Charleston, and New York.
The engraver relocated to Boston during the Revolutionary War. In the final years of the war, he produced portraits of patriot leaders, including His Excellency George Washington, Esqr., General and Commander in Chief of the Allied Armies, Supporting the Independence of America; The Honorable Samuel Adams, Esqr., First Delegate to Congress from Massachusetts; and His Excellency Nathaniel Green, Esqr., Major General of the American Army. In 1782, Norman engraved, published, and advertised Plan of the Town of Boston, with the ATTACK on BUNKERS-HILL, in the Peninsula of CHARLESTOWN, the 17th of June, 1775. His engravings, both portraits and maps, contributed to the commodification of patriotism during the era of the American Revolution, a different sort of project than the “ARCHITECT and LANDSCAPE-ENGRAVER” first envisioned in his advertisement in the Pennsylvania Journal.
