Evening Star Newspaper, November 8, 1931, Page 82

3 THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, NOVEMBER 8, 1931. Celebrating #he 300th Birthdayof Classified Ads Theophraste Renaudot, who printed the first want ads 300 years ago. BY HELEN WELSHIMER. ILLIONS of pecple who read the want ads probably have an idea that there have always been want ads at their disposal. Few of them ever stop to won- der how the custom started, but just recently it was discovered that want ads were really a Paris fashicn. Three hundred years ago a man named Thecphraste Renaudot started the custom. France has been celebrat- ing his an §. this year, and other coun- tries have 3 But even Renaudot had to go back several thousands of years for his ideas. Want ads had their beginning long before Caesar conquered Gaul. The Romans bad no newspapers. They could get along very well without knowing the latest scandal betwecen Mark Antony and Cleopatra. But they realized that it would be a mighty fine thing to have some method of spreading the news when they had houses for rent cr sale. They started the custom of smoothing off and whitening a place on the wall of the house for written announcements or sculptured in- scriptions. . That helped a little. Not enough, though. People, hunting available houses, were quite lik to miss a street where an ad waited to be read. Public walls were set aside and used as ad- vertising stations for those who had houses to rent. The wall read much like a current classi- fied ad column. N ancient Greece the first written classified advertisements didn’t offer anything for sale. They were announcements on papyrl of re- wards for the re.urn of runaway slaves. Cen- turies later, when the invention of printing brought about the publication of newspapers, the. very first classified ads were offers of re- wards for slaves and bond servants. England had a much more interesting custom a thousand years ago. Most people couldn’t read and write. Everybody could hear. Men with loud voices were selected as town criers. They had large horns to magnify their voices. ‘The town criers did the local advertising. If somebody lost a cow all the loser had to do was to tell the town crier about it. As the crier walked up and down the street he would 4 information to the world. If he a flair for rhymes, so much the better. -up advertisements in England. who knew how to write, which was ore than most could do, made a busi- making hand-written announcements or public posters. Strangely enough, young clergymen were the first people to take advantage of advertising. The level-headed business men who knew how OON servants decided that if the clergy could get jobs by advertising they could, too. Housewives made up their minds that the same method that brought a priest ought to bring a cook. People who lost articles also followed the general trend of advertising. The principal station was the middle aisle of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. Seamstresses, especially, went there to wait for some one to hire them, and there was a special pillar where sewing men waited until somebody who wanted a suit haled them into service. Theophraste Renaudot came along with his new idea about 1630. Reraudot, who was born in 1586, at Loudun- Poitu, France, started out to be a doctor. At the age of 20 he had graduated in medicine, But his interests were varied. He conducted a travel tour, operated the first pawn shop in France, a drug store, and a free medical clinic. Besides that he wrote 8 book called “A Treatise on the Poor,” and served as historian to the king. In addition, he ran a sort of job agency. The king was so delighted with the young physician’s book that he promptly put him in charge of a gigantic relief work. Paris needed help. It was filled with disease. The religious wars had just ended and soldiers and adventurers came drifting in every day. One day Renaudot had an idea. “If some one wants to work, and some one to employ, some one wants to sell and some one wants to buy, both must be supplied with the address of the other with the least expense and loss of time,” he said. He proceeded to open an office, somswhat on the order of a modern employment bureau. He decided that France needed a newspaper. Strangely Enough, the Frenchman Who Invented Want Ads in 1631 Also Ran the First Pawn Moast Veroon tn Vieginia, July 13, 973 TN[_% Daving obesined Patents for of TWENTY TRW&\ID Acres of LAND on the Obie and Groat Keabews (Ten Thousand of which we firusied on the bonks of the frfl.meniiomed lqm the movths of the two Kenbpuas, dnd ' GEORGE WASHINGTON, An ad inserted in various colonial news- papers by George Washington, who had some land to sell. It didn't have one. Nelther did England. Over in Germany single sheets had been published. China had the Peking Gazette, which had had 1,000 years of Gninterrupted publication. ©On the night of May 20, 1631, Renaudot, with the aid of one man, produced his first paper. The sheets were hung to dry on cords stretched around the room. Early the next morning the publisher took the sheets and delivered one set to Louis XIII, one to Richeélieu. E told the public that the paper contained “hot news.” It was two months old, since it had to come to Paris by letter. Nobody had heard any of it, though, so it still had news value. This is the way the stories ran: “The Shah of Persia is waging war on his subjects who use tobacco by suffocating num- ¢ bers of them to death with the smoke of the weed.” HE classified ads were much more irteresting to the people of Paris. They scanned the column eagerly: “Wanted; A House in Any Part of Paris . . . At Any Price.” “Dromedary for sale. By the time Renaudot’s paper was three years old the classified ad column was the most im- portant phase of the paper. Then, in 1692, after Shakespeare had writ- ten his plays and been buried in Westminster Abbey, John Houghton, an apothecary who had a little shop in London, where he sold coffee and tea and chocolate, got the same idea. On the side he reviewed books. Still the No reasonable offer re- GAZETTES de lannée 1632, DEDIE' AV ROY, AVEC VNE PREFACE SERVANT ahlflgf-nhclfi,')[u'm ¢ vae Table alphaberique des moeres AuBurcau &Addrellcaugrand % dela Calandse, fimcnmke.ui’:.l?m?m 4 M, DC. XXXIL The oldest newspaper file in the world. The front page of the first issue of Ren- audot’s newspaper. time hung heavy. So one day he started a price bulletin with advertisements. They read like this: “At one Mr. Packer’s, in Crooked Lane, next the Dolphin, are very good lodgings to be let, where there is a freedom from noise and a pretty garden.” The London Morning Post started up in 1795, Daniel Stuart and Samuel Coleridge were its founders. By 1800 it was a great small ad medium. Its founders wisely told the world that want ads attract readers. Circulation is promoted. And advertising picks up when a paper has lots of readers. “Personal” ads, used by youths seeking girl friends, were quickly developed. In America, at the beginning of the eight- eenth century, John Campbell had started the (Copyright, the London Illustrated News.) How the old Romans used want ads. A painting showing a wall inscription used in Pompeii during a heated election campaign. “Boston News Letter.” It was want ad stufl. America had never tried it before. The third number of the paper, dated May 1 to 8, 1704, had one item offering a reward for the capture of a thief. Somebody else was trying to locate some men’s linen and woolen apparel stolen from the house of James Cooper, A third man had real estate to sell. All to- gether, the three occupied four inches of space in a single column. Papers started to gain headway. And wherever they went they carried the potent little want ad. Everybody used them. Even George Wash- ington knew that it was the quickest way of selling his Western lands. He inserted an advertisement in the Mary- land and Baltimore Adviser, on August 20, 1773. After that he used a regular series of them. The “Pennsylvania Gazette” carried one on September 22, 1773. The “Pennsylvania Packet” used it on April 27, 1784, and the “Columbian Mirror and Alexandria Gazette” February 20, 1796. Hozw Can Future WV ars BeAverted? Continued from Third Page must be fit to defend himself and help his friends.” Lord Allenby smiled and quoted again: Still amid life’s froth and trouble, Two things stand like stone— Kindness in another’s trouble, Courage in one’s own. “Women,” he continued, “have an obligation to the nation, too.” “What can they do?” “As much as men,” came his reply. “‘There are more women in the world than men. They have equal and full civic rights. It is just as important for them as for young men to fit themselves to carry out the duties which lie before them. They are the future mothers of the nation. Remember that line about ‘the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world’? “Aside from the fact that it is for their in- terests to stop war, the English-speaking na- tions should show the rest of the world the path to peace,” he continued thoughtfully. “Never to be broken is the bond formed between America and Great Britain during the last war, when they learned to know each other better and admire each other more. “America has everything it needs to give the world a fine example, for peace and progress g0 hand-in-hand,” he said enthusiastically. “On my visit to America in 1928” (he referred tohis trip as guest at the American Legion con- vention,) “I was most impressed by the un- fortified boundary line between the United States and Canada—3,000 miles without a fort on it. In 110 years not a warship has disturbed the Great Lakes! That i3 a most encouraging factor, of prime importance to peace. “And throughout the United States, wherever I went, I found a sentiment indicating that the future of the world is bound up with good understanding between them and the British Empire,” he stressed. *“I don’t mean we shan't have squabbles,” he said, with a quick smile, “because we are both proud nations and don’t like criticism. When any one criticizes us, we are likely to answer back, but that is of small matter. Our interests are closely bound to- gether. “But let us not talk of war any more,” he said with quiet sincerity. “I hate it. I am a man of peace.” JUBT then Lady Allenby entered, slender, gracious-faced, still remembered as the idol of the troops in Egypt when she was its first lady, for, after the war, Lord Allenby was temporary High Commissioner of Egypt and the Sudan. As though to indicate where he found respite from matters military, the great military com- mander led us out to his birdhouse in the garden and began animated conversation with his red-breasted finches, Pekin robins and crimson-eared waxbills, “These are his playmates for several hours each morning—except when he is off in Scot- land fishing or shooting,” Lady Allenby confided. It is said of Gen. Allenby that for his recrea- tion in the campaign in the Holy Land he would leave his maps and go into the fields to study the birds and wild flowers. Something in the quick, angry chirping of two robins suddenly made the famous field marshal turn to Lady Allenby and say: “Re- member those nursery rhymes?” Then, with a whimsical smile, se quoted: Dogs delight to bark and bite, For God has made them so. Bears and lions growl and fight, For ’tis their nature to. But, children, you should never let “Your angry passions rise, For little hands were never made To tear each other’s eyes. “Nitions should remember that,” he said, becoming serious again. “Civilization is very young. The human race has not gone very far, and nations cannot be called grown up until they give up fighting.”