JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

In 1869 there weren’t yet catchy tunes or jingles to help you remember the name of a product that you didn’t need though purchased because of some subliminal twitch, and there weren’t many images of a well-turned ankle stretched over the bottom rung of a farm-intended three-horse equalizer, and the colorfully pulsating repetitive splash imagery wasn’t close yet to being part of The Daily Life of the Average Person–what certainly did exist was the misleading/phony bait-and-switch lede, which today I guess would be called “click bait”.   Here’s a great example of that, not-so-deeply-nestled in the back pages of the June 1869 issue of American Agriculturalist. The column seems to announce AN EARTHQUAKE perhaps on JUNE 30TH–but all it is is an advertisement for becoming a subscriber, and it turns out to be that the journal is a very useful farmer’s friend.  The ad did however try to grab the attention of the passing reader–and it was still working, 147 years later.