ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we move from the real to the abstract elements of retailing.1 It is the first of three chapters that are mainly concerned with the features of promotional materials and their role and effect, and this chapter serves to insert some suggestions about early modern advertising practices into the wider context of retailing activity. We present a detailed analysis of two specimen advertisements, and identify a list of buzzwords that were used. The aim is to set out the key promotional concepts in force at the time to make suggestions about some of the advertising strategies of selling mundane, functional objects. The idea that advertisements were a form of virtual distribution that supplied information to eighteenth-century consumers, conveying important messages about the functionality, the appropriateness and the desirability of the physical object is developed throughout. Advertising, we argue, may be treated as a form of virtual shop floor and a direct extension of the premises of the retailer. Advertising was also the rational outcome of fixed retail premises: the more shops, which by their nature were festooned in one place, the greater the need for mobile information. This is not to say that itinerant traders did not use advertisements in newspapers and in the form of handbills, but bulk, size and spatial immobility required them more than small and intensely mobile retailing did.
