For humble homes and wealthy tables: advertising consumables in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Basel

ABSTRACT This article investigates the promotion of food and drink through newspaper advertisements in the Swiss city of Basel. Drawing on over 39,000 sale advertisements for consumables between 1729 and 1844 published in the local intelligence paper, it calls into question the marginal role given to advertising in practices of selling groceries during the long eighteenth century. Sellers of food and drink in Basel demonstrated a wide variety of different commercial strategies and languages tailored to the commodities for sale and the customers they sought to attract. These results further problematise the still prevalent notion of slow development of consumption and retail cultures in German-speaking areas of Europe.


Introduction
Advertising has long been discussed in the context of changing retail practices in the long eighteenth century.Printed advertisements in newspapers and in the form of trade cards and bill headings in particular have attracted much attention.While research by McKendrick and others has drawn a direct line between the increasing volume and degree of sophistication of print advertising and the so-called consumer revolution, this narrative has been called into question by further studies, with Cox as well as Lyna and Van Damme, among others, pointing out how relatively few shops and fewer still of the most fashionable ones adopted print advertising as a marketing strategy. 1ood and drink, two of the main areas of changing consumer preferences and practices in the long eighteenth century, have played a very marginal role in these debates. 2 Previous studies suggested that sellers of consumables 3 turned to print advertising only very infrequently; in English provincial newspapers Stobart encountered only up to eight notices per year by grocers between the 1740s and 1820s; out of over 1,500 Antwerp advertisements studied by Lyna and Van Damme, only 197 were retail-related and fewer still would have offered consumables. 4Consequently, the history of advertising and the study of promotional uses of language is, apart from with regard to medicinal products, mostly focused on durable consumer goodsbooks, textiles or artwith an especially pronounced interest in auction notices which made up the bulk of many advertising sections. 5hese studies generally focus on the slowly dissipating mistrust of marketing practices and the different trajectories of adaptation by various retail sections, the embedding of advertising into notions of polite and genteel society and the role of commercial material in their dissemination, as well as the (non-)persuasive effect of advertisements.
However, as is the case with much of early modern consumption and even more of retail history, existing research mostly focuses on Northwestern Europe. 6The few studies venturing beyond English, Dutch or French printed promotional material highlight the need to study advertising in different geographical, political and economic settings.Hart, for example, demonstrated how advertising played a much larger role in the British American colonies than in England and Scotland, while Brauner convincingly argued for a more comprehensive look at advertising as a communicative practice beyond print. 7Murhem investigated the effects of guild law on advertising activities in Stockholm, where notices for (imported) consumables figured much more prominently than in provincial English papers, where, in contrast, Stobart has suggested their scarcity was due to a 'more muted influence of fashion' on the grocery sector and less or differently structured competition. 8uilding on these different studies, this article investigates the commercial languages of food and drink in the Swiss city of Basel from 1729 to 1844 in the Basel Avisblatt publication, where such advertising was much more prevalent than elsewhere, as this study will demonstrate. 9In doing so, my aim is to colour in two blind spots of historians of advertising.I address the first by focusing on a mid-sized city in the German-speaking region of Europe, which has mostly been overlooked so far. 10For this purpose, Basel is an interesting case study.The politico-economic environment was shaped by traditional 'social institutions ', 11 with guild law controlling who could produce what and sell it when to whom well into the second half of the nineteenth century.Simultaneously, the city was engaged in European and global flows of goods and an increasingly wealthy elite was very much interested in luxury consumption. 12o address the second blind spot, I make use of a source equally understudied: intelligence publications.Filled with (classified) advertisements instead of news and thus mitigating economic transactions on a local and regional level, these Intelligenzblätter (or in French: Feuille d'avis) were first established in the early eighteenth century and soon could be found throughout Central Europe.They combined the wide reach of a print publication with the advantages of a local office, where people could place their ads, inquire about an offer or look for lost property. 13While advertisements were a source of income for political newspapers, for such advertisers they were the main and frequently only content. 14Hence, these papers offer great potential for broadening and nuancing our understanding of consumption and retail history, demonstrated by growing scholarly interest. 15he article is divided into four sections.Parts one and two are concerned with the communicational structures used to frame the promotion of food and drink in the Avisblatt, focusing on advertising as both an intermittent and a routine commercial activity and investigating list-like structures and polite framings respectively.Zooming into the specific descriptions of food and drink advertisers hoped to sell, the third section focuses on the use of markers describing their quality, both with and without referring to their monetary value.The fourth part is an investigation of promotional strategies to arouse interest and trust through diverse languages of place, reputation and popularity.
Since this study focuses on investigating long-term developments in how consumables were advertised, the Avisblatt corpus was divided into four equal time periods (hereafter shortened to TP) of 29 years each (1729-1757, 1758-1786, 1787-1815 and 1816-1844) to make long-term developments visible.As Table 1 indicates, the Basel case provides the chance to study advertising on a completely different scale from before: out of 187,000 unique sale notices in the Avisblatt over 39,000 were offering consumables. 16Except for highly regulated basic foodstuffs like grain, bread, butter or vegetables, which were only rarely advertised, almost everything edible or drinkable was eventually advertised by professional as well as semi-or non-professional sellers. 17uantitative insights from this corpus are underpinned by qualitative examples and small case studies of the advertising activities of specific sellers or around certain products.While advertising offers insights into what food and drink was offered, the main interest here lies in how these advertisements were framed and phrased, while trajectories of specific food or drink products will only be discussed in very broad terms.

Framing advertising: special occasions and routine activities
Opening a shop in spring 1834, Carl Christof Rumpf-Müller advertised his new venture in the Avisblatt: Although it is hardly difficult for anyone to procure the diverse necessities of daily life in the city, be it for the daily cooking of the humble home or for the tables of the wealthy richly stocked with foreign products, I nevertheless believe that it would not be unwelcome for the local public as well as for those living outside the town to find many of these products displayed for sale in one single place.For this reason alone, I have established such a grocery shop and hereby take the liberty of recommending it in the best possible way. 18llowing this declaration, he listed the goods he promised to stock: different varieties of sugar, coffee, tea, cocoa and chocolate; grains, beans and starches of different qualities sourced from anywhere between Germany and the East Indies; fruit from the Basel countryside and tropical fruits, fresh, dried or candied; sweet and salted butter; the finest spices, condiments and preserves; nuts from Spain and Italy, and Swiss honey, alongside several types of cheese.
Although extensive, Rumpf-Müller's list did not include anything that had been difficult to source before: by the 1830s, even goods that had been expensive luxuries a century earlier were thoroughly incorporated into Swiss food cultures, with cheaper varieties of poorer quality and surrogate products making them (at least occasionally) affordable also to less affluent sections of society. 19Moreover, his claim of more or less inventing the grocery shop was very obviously an exaggeration: in 1754, for instance, Johann Hauser had posted a similarif shorternotice announcing the opening of a grocery shop carrying many of the goods sold by Rumpf-Müller 90 years later. 20ike them, many sellers of groceries turned to advertising in the Avisblatt in the case of a 'special event', announcing new business ventures, the arrival or renewal of stock or a change in address or ownership.While to modern sellers (and consumers) the need for advertising is self-evident, this is not the case for early modern ones; the practice was often regarded as suspicious, potentially presenting a danger to established legitimate trade. 21At first glance, sellers citing reasons for advertising in the Avisblatt seem to be informed by these ideas, presenting advertising in the guise of a public service.
Indeed, framing an advertisement for consumables with such triggers was a remarkably consistent practice: between 23.3 for TP 1 and 29.8 per cent for TP 2 of advertisers justified their presence in the Avisblatt with a slight downward trend in TP 3 (24.6 per cent) reversed in the final quarter, TP 4 (Table 2).At first glance, this persistence of triggered advertisements seems to confirm the still prevalent 'gloomy picture' of consumer society and retail structures in German-speaking regions. 22This becomes especially evident when taking into account that the 'development of advertising from special event to routine activity' has been considered as one of the origins of 'modern commercial advertising'. 23While there were non-triggered ads for food and drink throughout all time periods, in the case of the Avisblatt, there was no clear shift to such a modern way of advertising even by the end of TP 4.
However, considering the inherent properties of consumables, the continuing appeal of such triggers and the employment of advertising as a routine activity and commercial strategy are not mutually exclusive.Most food and drink products were perishable and seasonal, which made information on what was available when and where especially important. 24This becomes evident when one looks only at advertisements selling imported products for which availability was dependent on a wholesaler's deliveries: for every time period, these show a marked increase of trigger use with an overall share of 40.7 per cent compared to 26.9 per cent for all products (Table 2). 25Although local as well as global non-seasonable or storable consumables were available throughout the year, their availability from specific sellers still varied.Because of its wide but local reach, the Avisblatt presented a convenient platform on which to announce new arrivals or to correct misinformation, supplementing word-of-mouth and accelerating the diffusion of information to existing and new customers. 26he use of triggers on the other hand was not a reliable indicator of the frequency and consistency of a seller's presence in the Avisblatt.While both Hauser and Rumpf-Müller announced the opening of their shops by advertisement in 1745 and 1834 respectively, the former never advertised again. 27The latter, however, did so on many occasions, with an additional 54 unique advertisements until 1838 testifying to his short-lived but extensive business activities. 28Triggers continued to feature prominently in Rumpf-Müller's subsequent notices, appearing in a staggering 39 (72.2 per cent) of his advertisements.
Rumpf-Müller's extensive use of advertising in comparison to Hauser's one-off use is exemplary of a general trend.In the early decades of the Avisblatt, sellers like Hauser usually posted very intermittently, as did the grocer Jacob Amadeus Iselin, with 14 advertisements between 1732 and 1761, or Daniel Scholer with 23 between 1740 and 1766.Only in the 1770s did some sellers markedly increase their advertising presence, as in the case of the grocer Abraham Früh who posted a total of 144 advertisements between 1765 and 1800, Matthias Dietschy with 32 between 1800 and 1814 and J. J. Eckenstein, with 97 between 1820 and 1843.Evidently, advertising frequently and consistently in the Avisblatt became an increasingly viable commercial strategy for those selling groceries, who thus regularly kept in touch with their existing customers through print and, hopefully, attracted new ones.While it is difficult to determine, how many of those selling food and drink in Basel maintained a frequent or intermittent presence in the Avisblatt, the sheer volume of advertising activity suggests that it certainly was a decidedly larger share than in political newspapers studied elsewhere.

Listing goods and promoting services
When in 1827, Mrs Steiger had just received a new delivery of Hypocras, a kind of spiced wine, she 'also recommend[ed] herself with her well-known white and yellow cookies, liqueurs, treacle, punch and spirits, rhum, cognac, absinthe, Malaga, muscat and Alicante wine, chocolate with and without sugar and with vanilla, candied citrus and orange peel'. 29resenting goods in the form of such a list is a well-known characteristic of eighteenth-century advertising. 30There are several parameters indicating the frequency of their use in the Avisblatt, namely the mean number of tokens, the mean number of different categories (e.g.alcohol, pastry, sugar, etc.), and the mean number of references to different items (e.g.cognac, absinthe, Malaga wine, etc.).All these auxiliary values point to a steady increase in formatting advertisements as a list, with a more marked increase starting in the last period after 1815 (Table 3).While such advertisements were present earlieran especially extensive one from 1752, for instance, offered no fewer than 18 alcoholic beverages 31 their growing popularity after the turn of the century is again evidence of an intensifying use of this channel of communication from (semi-)professional sellers, including those who were members of the grocers' guild.While in the last decades of the research period there were a few scattered examples of wholesalers or manufacturers advertising in lieu of a specific product sold by local agents, 32 unlike with English marketing for tea and medicinal products, the overwhelming share of notices was still posted by local producers and retailers. 33For them, highlighting the variety and range of their stock was key, impressing and enticing the reader with visions of abundance, rather than interesting them in any specific product. 34Many sellers further reinforced this effect by ending their advertisements with words or phrases like 'etc' or 'and many other groceries as well', promising customers a larger selection than could fit into even the most generous of word counts.
In a seemingly contradictory development towards the second quarter of the nineteenth century somealbeit a much smaller number ofadvertisers started to forgo mentioning any goods at all except in a very general way.What list-like advertisements did implicitly, these sellers spelled out: they advertised themselves, their expertise, connections and trustworthiness. 35It is in these advertisements published mostly in the third or fourth period studied that the concept of early modern advertising being linked mainly to the person of the seller instead of the goods advertised is most visible in the Avisblatt. 36n especially conspicuous case was that of the merchant J. J. Eckenstein, mentioned as an avid advertiser above, who, in 1833, sold tobacco.Instead of elaborating on the different varieties, qualities and usages of his products, he simply told the public that 'my smoking tobacco and cigar stock is well supplied' and continued: Through special connections with equally important and famous manufacturers, I am in a position to offer the most advantageous prices and conditions; I refrain from any praise of my tobacco varieties, and only add the remark that every honoured customer will be able to convince himself immediately of its quality and value for money by any tests; whereby I recommend myself in the best possible way with the assurance of reliable service. 37 the time Eckenstein was penning this notice, like him many sellers were emphasising courteous service and deference, with 21.7 per cent of advertisements employing at least some polite language in TP 4. Before that, politeness as communicational framing was negligible, with 3.9 per cent in the first, 3.6 per cent in the second and only a slight increase to 5.9 per cent in the third period.
Such courteous expressions could be quite wordy; selling a variety of mineral waters, in 1821 Henry Wenck, for instance, started off with, 'I have the honour to notify the honourable local public' and ended with '[b]y providing the best, most prompt and most courteous service, I will strive to earn more and more of the trust that one wishes to place in me, and with this I commend myself most warmly to everyone's kind approval', using almost the same number of words for the communicational framing as for the goods themselves. 38Comparing this with an earlier advertisement for the same product from 1787 exemplifies the stark difference; the whole of the older advertisement read, 'At the Schwanen there is newly arrived Selteser water to be had for a just price'. 39ften bracketing the offers, the frequent use of such polite framing was a significant change from earlier decades.Whereas the emergence of a polite shopping culture over the course of the eighteenth century is widely researched for Northwestern Europe, the German-speaking parts have only recently begun to be incorporated into these debates. 40hough the concept of polite consumption is multi-faceted and does not hinge on advertising alone, the evidence from the Basel Avisblatt suggests a later timeframe for its widespread popularisation in the Swiss context that has been discussed for other regions. 41

Describing quality and naming prices
While the communicational framing and structural design of advertisements were dependent on both established or emerging conventions and the personal preference of the advertisers, the common denominator across all Avisblatt advertisements was, of course, mentioning the products for sale.How and in how much detail food and drink were described varied: with limited space and almost no means of directly engaging the visual sense, not to mention taste, touch or smell, the careful choice and placement of words were the only tools sellers had to communicate the nature and value of their offers and attract potential customers. 42any of these languages describing food and drink were highly specific; the duality of red and white was helpful only for wine and the distinction between the use for smoking or snuffing unnecessary for anything but tobacco.For assurances of quality in a more general sense, though, advertisers fell back on a very stable set of adjectives and adverbs regardless of the specific product: good and its superlatives (gut-, best-), beautiful/nice (schön-), fine ( fein-) and fresh/new ( frisch-) are all applied consistently and over all four time periods studied.Frequently combined with intensifiers such as very (sehr, ganz, treflich, recht), extra or super, they indiscriminately described dried fish and fresh fruit, roasted coffee and tart cheese, as well as fresh peas and biscuits. 43ollowing the argument put by Lyna and van Damme, the inclusion of such small words turned an informative advertisement focused on lowering transaction costs into a persuasive one. 44However, with their ubiquitous use in the Avisblatt, it is difficult to discern how muchif anymeaning both advertisers and readers attributed to them. 45Still, while it is impossible to determine the qualitative difference between 'coffee, 'good coffee' and 'extra good coffee' without any further elaboration, it is important to note that advertisers could also choose not to include such descriptors.Consequently, even if it was vague, these words carried a specific meaning, most obvious in two scenarios: one, if a singular seller offered a product in a range of different qualities, thus enabling readers to assess the goods in relation to each other, and, two, if a seller listed a lot of different consumables.Although lists, as discussed earlier, were a convenient stylistic choice to evoke a sense of abundance, they also had the significant drawback that every product blended into this vision.Using qualifying descriptors for some but not all the goods listed enabled advertisers to direct both their readers' gaze andhopefullyinterest to specific products.
While general mentions of quality carried at least some meaning in the context of a single advertisement, it is hard to imagine even contemporaries being able to discern much about the quality of consumables offered at a price described as 'very reasonable'. 46his did not mean, however, that information on pricing was deemed irrelevant: 37.1 per cent of all advertisements for food and drink between 1729 and 1844 contain at least one specific price point for an edible or drinkable product which, in comparison to most other advertised movable goods, is quite high.While there is surprisingly little fluctuation when one looks at all advertisements for consumables, not all sub-categories were priced with equal regularity.Those advertisements promoting mainly imported goods included some kind of price information in between 40.1 (TP 1) and 52.1 (TP 3) per cent compared to a share between 18.5 (TP 2) and 29.3 (TP 3) per cent of those offering mainly local goods (Table 4). 47he more frequent inclusion of price information was probably a result of sellers having to acquire these products from merchants and wholesalers, whereas pricing for locally grown and produced goods was more flexible.However, the early appearance of prices in such large numbers is striking: research generally points to the practice of fixed pricinga key development in the retail revolutionbecoming more prevalent only in the second half of the eighteenth century. 48As Stobart has suggested and as the Avisblatt data seem to confirm, groceries were 'especially amenable to fixed pricing', with knowledge of goods, their monetary value and fluctuations in pricing being widespread. 49Nevertheless, compared with other studies of advertising in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the inclusion of such 'terms of sale' is adapted on a decidedly larger scale in the Basel case. 50In Stockholm, for example, only 7 per cent of advertisements in 1790 included a fixed price and even non-specific references to prices were rare.While the Stockholm guilds evidently restricted the publication of prices in advertising to reduce comparison and competition, this was apparently no concern in Basel. 51aming a price for a product enabled potential customers to gauge the quality of offers and compare them with similar products both on and off the pages of the Avisblatt as well as with their knowledge of market conditions even before contacting the seller or inspecting the goods.Considering the possibility of price as a unique selling point and the apparent lack of restrictions on their publication, it is surprising that they were hardly ever explicitly presented as a competitive advantage. 52Even vague justifications of pricing were rare and usually emphasised only the satisfactory quality of a product priced particularly cheaply, reassuring customers of a good bargain instead of an inferior product, such as when tobacco was 'very pleasant to smoke despite the low price' 53 or when an advertiser in 1832 promised to pay '100 Francs to anyone' who could prove that his particularly cheap chocolate contained 'something other than cocoa, sugar and flavouring'. 54Such exceptions notwithstanding, while price could be and increasingly was a selling point even by the mid-nineteenth century it was evidently not an essential one.Since sale offers in the Avisblatt almost exclusively referred to goods offered in the city itself and its readership was decidedly local, the transition from interest in an offer to inspection of the goods would seldom have required much time or effort.The tangible practices of judging consumables and agreeing on a price satisfactory for both buyer and seller took place offpage, with advertised prices merely being another point of reference. 55

Place, reputation and popularity
It is perhaps surprising that advertisements for food and drink only very rarely elaborated on smell or taste, and if they did they usually did so by comparison. 56This was the case when in 1734 a variety of 'Swiss coffee' was advertised 'which in smell and taste is almost exactly the same as Levante coffee'. 57Based on this information alone, if a consumer did not already know what to expect from Levante coffee, the qualities of Swiss coffee would equally have remained a mystery.Whereas the sense of taste thus remained a very intangible reference, this example instead demonstrates one of the most versatile languages of advertising food and drink in the Avisblatt: the language of place. 58eographical descriptors linked foodstuffs or drink to a specific placesausages to St Gall, asparagus to Ulm or marrons to Lyonor a more generalised and vague area -Glarus tea, Levante coffee or American tobacco.They were used as a shorthand for provenance, but they could also become a 'label of … intrinsic qualities', 59 such as when taste was layered into 'Swiss' and 'Levante' in the example above, specifiy an appearance or form, denote a standard of quality, function as branding, guarantee genuineness, demonstrate freshness and highlight the good connections of the seller. 60With so many possible connotations, their meaning was often ambiguous even for contemporaries.Sellers thus frequently clarified how readers should interpret the geographic markers they used: selling tobacco, instead of advertising it as 'Italian', Theodor Beck promised 'the crate ha [d] just arrived from Italy', pointing not only to the origin of the leavesor at least the shipmentbut also to freshness and his good connections. 61Similarly, a couple of decades later, Mrs Dienast left no doubt as to the provenance of her 'finest Spanish tobacco from Seville'. 62ome of these links between a specific place and a certain commodity were persistent.This was the case with lemons, for which 'Italy' and, more specifically, 'Genua' were the most frequently used qualifiers overall, even compared with other descriptors like 'fresh', 'large' or 'nice': for TP 1 13.9 per cent, for TP 2 24.1 per cent, for TP 3 25.7 per cent and for TP 4 18.8 per cent of sellers described their lemons using such geographic markers.While it is likely that most of these fruits were indeed imported from Italy, this was not always the case, as the example of chocolate demonstrates.Generally, chocolate was very infrequently associated with specific places, most of which were far from where chocolate beans were grown.Instead, it was again Italy that figured prominently from 1758 onwards as the most frequent geographic marker, with the Netherlands taking second spot until 1786, France until 1815 and Germany gaining traction in the last period investigated.Interestingly, sellers thus often linked their products to places where it was processed rather than grown.For advertisers in and readers of the Avisblatt the marketing of chocolate thus carried almost no exotic connotations, even though it remained a comparatively expensive and luxurious product well into the early nineteenth century. 63he use of different types of geographic markers was generally widespread: names of places and regions were present in about a third of advertisements for consumables in TP 1 and TP 2 and a staggering 78.1 per cent and 82.0 per cent in TP 3 and TP 4 respectively (Table 5).Overall, references to neighbouring countries and regions figure most prominently, with locations in Germany and France the most common as well as the most diverse in all four time periods. 64Generally, as in the examples of tobacco and chocolate above, colonial goods were at best infrequently linked to their 'exotic' origins: tea, for example, was rarely labelled as coming from Asian territories, while references to sugar's association with the Americas were almost non-existent.Instead, they were linked either to their point of entry into the European continent or to the place where they were processed, which was increasingly in neighbouring countries or Switzerland itself. 65While the goods themselves were of global origin and most customers would have been aware of that, in advertising them these links apparently played no essential part in the promotional languages around consumables advertisers used and readers were accustomed to. 66t was not colonial goods, then, triggering the marked rise in advertisements including geographic markers after the mid 1780s.Instead, this development was spearheaded by placenames increasingly becoming synonymous with a specific foodstuff or drink, especially prominent examples being alcoholic beverages such as Bordeaux or Champagne, mineral water, and cheese whose increasing use is thus almost congruent with the period from 1760 to 1820, which Meyzie described as the key period for the establishment of products linked to their French origin. 67Table 5 demonstrates the intensified use of such origin-brands, with references to German, French and Swiss regions figuring most prominently. 68ome of these distinct associations were not yet fixed, however, with many of these geographic locations still being used in tandem with the product they were attached to, e.g 'Champagne wine' and 'Gruyère cheese' instead of just 'Champagne' or 'Gruyère'. 69ow uncertain these geographic markers were is exemplified by a dispute over the meaning of Karlsruhe rusk ('Karlsruher Zwieback'). 70Broomsquire Abraham Wertenberg was an avid advertiser, publishing 37 notices between 1826 and 1837 for a wide variety of goods.In early 1835, he added a new product to his portfolio: 'the beloved genuine Karlsruhe rusk for the use in soups for children, always fresh'. 71When, a few months later, he became aware of local bakers using the same name for their wares, he alerted the public through the Avisblatt: 'Since these biscuits have recently been counterfeited in this region and sold in various places as genuine ones, I feel compelled to draw the attention of the public to this fraud'. 72A genuine Karlsruhe rusk, for Wertenberg, was only one imported from the city of Karlsruhe, every other product only borrowed its reputation together with the name without providing the authentic product.
While comparative advertising was increasingly used to contrast the genuineness of wares with those counterfeited, stretched or mislabelled, 73 in an unexpected turn of events two of the bakers Wertenberg had accused answered him in the Avisblatt: To Mister Abraham Wertenberg … who has accused us of fraud … , we as local master bakers hereby respond: that we indeed make these biscuits, and that, as any test will show, they are just as good as and even more beneficial for the health of children than those from the Karlsruhe bakers, and that he, Mr Wertenberg himself, … is in fact the swindler who is interfering with our profession by trading in these baked goods without legal authorisation to do so in addition to selling his broomsquire goods, an action for which he has been duly reported to the authorities. 74wever, their complaint came to nothing: Wertenberg continued to advertise and sell his rusk from Karlsruhe 75 and the master bakers continued to sell Karlsruhe rusk produced in their local bakeries.In the end, the question which was the more genuine, healthier and preferred version of the biscuit was left to the consumers. 76ven if unsuccessful, theoretically the bakers' argument was solid: instead of associating provenance with reputation, they underlined the superior quality of their wares as a product of their guild association, proving that they had the skills to make and sell baked goods while Wertenberg did not.Referring to the appropriate guild and profession could enhance the reader's trust in a specific offer, building upon certified credibility and expertise and presenting the offer as respectable.For baked goods and meat products guild associations were mentioned especially frequently: even with many advertisements being posted semi-anonymously, between 1758 and 1786 (TP 2), 45.1 per cent of such notices referred to either a profession or a guild.However, their share fell to 35.4 per cent by 1825 (TP 3) and even lower, to 21.7 per cent, for TP 4, hinting at the decreasing usefulness of such associations.Thus, while guilds were still regulating and monitoring much of artisanal labour in Basel, by the early nineteenth century their control over the production and retail of groceries seems to have somewhat decreased.
However, just like Wertenberg, Basel's inhabitants had long since used the Avisblatt to advertise commercial activities at the margins of or outside of such regulatory oversight.Especially sellers of small batches of food and drink rarely had any guild association to refer to and with many of their goods being grown and produced locally, they could also not fall back upon the versatile shorthand of geographic markers.Mostly promoting a single commodity or a small selection thereof, these advertisers instead offered detailed information on the goods and their production or referred to testimonials to convince the reading public of the merit of their goods and their trustworthiness as sellers.
With advertisements for donkey's milk, for instance, consumed as a kind of 'superfood' with various health benefits, 77 freshness and genuineness were of the utmost importance.To reassure customers of the highest quality, they were invited to be present at the milking or to do it themselves; 78 bottles were made 'especially … for this purpose'; 79 or it was promised that the female donkeys averred to be fed only 'the most beautiful and strongest clover'. 80Similarly, makers of snail broth assured readers that they had been encouraged to do so 'by multiple friends' 81 or promised to prepare the broth with only 'sanitary and well prepared' 82 tools.
Another way to promote trust in a specific offer was by emphasising the popularity of the foodstuff or drink itself.In most cases, consumables were thus described as popular, renowned or even famous were imported, as Table 6 demonstrates.This is true even in the two later time periods, when describing pastry and meat products in such terms became more popular, with Wertenberg's Karlsruhe rusk being one of many examples.
On the one hand, such descriptions of popularity sought to embed these goods firmly in the local food culture; customers were supposed to be familiar with them and their uses, needing little or no explanation of how to prepare and consume them.On the other hand, sellers implied a sense of exclusivity and high demand with stock often being limited, and by association imparted an air of the fashionable to the products, thus still distinguishing them from more local and traditional goods. 83As the comparatively small numbers in Table 6 demonstrate, such referencing remained the exception even in the mid-nineteenth century, with most advertisers choosing other commercial terminologies to describe food and drink.Furthermore, these advertisements were overwhelmingly placed in the Avisblatt by local sellers and shopkeepers instead of manufacturers or wholesalers and, contrary to those of the local producers and sellers, many of these advertisements did not concentrate on one foodstuff or drink, but instead incorporated them into a wider profile of other goodsjust as Hauser, Rumpf-Müller and many others advertised local, regional and global foodstuffs and drink for 'the humble home' as well as for the 'tables of the wealthy' next to each other, either in a single advertisement or juxtaposed in different notices across the pages of the Avisblatt. 84

Conclusion
Practices of advertising consumables were of much greater significance in Basel than previous studies for Northwestern and Northern Europe have shown.This may well be the result of the long-term success and popularity of the Avisblatt, offering professional as well as occasional sellers of food and drink a convenient, cheap and effective way to market their products to customers both old and new.
Advertising consumables in the Avisblatt was an inherently competitive practice.While a single advertisement seldom revealed strategies of comparative advertising regarding competitors or competing offers, readers and potential customers did not consume these advertisements in isolation, nor did advertisers intend them to be read in such a way.Instead, competition was created by the juxtaposition of many similarand differentoffers in each issue and over multiple weeks, every seller competing for readers' attention, interest and, in the end, money.
In clear contrast to advertising in political newspapers, such commercial practices in Basel were not limited to a handful of merchants, manufacturers or shopkeepers.This also meant, however, that different sellers brought different reasons, motivations and expectations into constructing these advertisements, all of which were reflected in the framing, phrasing and frequency of their notices.There was not one way of advertising consumables in the Avisblatt, nor was there one trajectory in which commercial strategies and languages evolved between 1729 and 1844.On the contrary, instead of a unifying and narrowing of different approaches to advertising, commercial languages became more varied over time.However, over the four time periods aggregated for the purpose of this study some general tendencies become clear.The first period from 1729 to 1757 was one of establishment: with the Avisblatt as a new platform, the practice of print advertising was not yet firmly established in the local retailing landscape.While sellers frequently preferred to remain (semi-)anonymous when selling small quantities of food or drink, from the very first years of publication some grocers and shopkeepers also advertised consumables on a larger scale, although they did so infrequently.However, these early advertisers for consumables laid the groundwork for advertising practices in Basel for decades to come, for instance by including fixed pricing early on and on a much larger scale than seen elsewhere.
TP 2 (1758-1786) was marked by an expansion in the number of advertisers and was the beginning of the intensified use of the Avisblatt for marketing consumables.A growing number of grocers and shopkeepers, but also guild artisans such as bakers or butchers, increasingly established a recurring presence in the Avisblatt to inform customers of changes in stock and entice them with either specific products or lists of multiple goods.
Building upon these developments, between 1787 and 1815 (TP 3) commercial languages around food became more varied, with more elaborate descriptions of individual commodities especially by small-scale sellers of a specific product, and, at the same time, more standardised.The latter development is especially visible in the expanding and more consistent use of geographical markers for different foodstuffs and drinks on the one hand and in the more regular use of fixed (or indicative) pricing.
It was only in the fourth period spanning from 1816 to 1844 that notions of politeness and a greater emphasis on the trustworthiness and expertise of the seller became a communicational framing for a substantial share of food and drink advertisements.This was, in its essence, the culmination of a slow pivoting from a focus on the commodities over to a focus on the seller and the shopping experience, even if advertisements had implicitly had similar connotations before.
It is important to note that over the whole publication of the Avisblatt commercial strategies and languages existed in tandem: advertising consumables in Basel could and in most cases did look quite similar in the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries, when unnamed sellers offered turnips and peas, Genoese lemons had freshly arrived from Italy or grocers announced the opening of a new shop listing their inventory.
However, this does not mean a return to the well-trodden path of the backward narrative of German and, in this case, Swiss consumption and retailing landscapes. 85On the contrary; advertisers selling food and drink in the Avisblatt demonstrated a wide variety of commercial strategies and languages.These were formed not only by advertising conventions very similar to those in other European regions but also specifically tailored to the goods they offered and the clientele they sought to attract and turn from readers into customers.Overall, while some developments seem to be adapted in Basel in a slightly later time frame, print advertising in general is used by a much wider and broader share of sellers than in Northwestern Europe.Thus, this case study of food and drink advertising has demonstrated the need to analyse advertising and its entanglement with languages of consumption in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in more varied geographic settings paying close attention to its medial embeddedness with local conventions, conditions and constraints shaping commercial practices and the meaning and uses of print advertising.8.The Swedish newspapers posted between 5 and 33 advertisements per issue, offering food in up to 14 per cent.Murhem, "Advertising"; Stobart, Sugar, 169.9.The Basel Avisblatt was founded in 1729 and run as a family business until spring 1845 when it changed ownership and was slowly transformed into a political newspaper with an advertising section.At least in the beginning, the cost of advertising in it was dependent on the value of the goods advertised and overall inexpensive with prices starting at 10 Pfennig for goods valued between 1 and 10 Gulden (120 to 1,200 Pfennig).While information on advertising costs remains elusive for later decades, they likely remained in a similar range.As is usually the case with early modern advertisers and newspapers, information on the print run and the number of readers is scarce.In 1818, then editor Peter Raillard counted around 900 subscriptions, though the number of readers would have been at least four times and up to twenty times that with subscriptions often shared between multiple households and the possibility to read the paper in public spaces such as taverns and the Berichthaus, where the editors accepted advertisements.Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt (StABS) Handel und Gewerbe JJJ 7, 07.02.1818.Jones, "The Great Chain," 18; Greiling, "Intelligenzblätter," 32. 10.Basel had around 15,000 inhabitants in the eighteenth century and just under 29,000 by 1850.11.Ogilvie, "Social Institutions".On the controversy over how guilds hindered or helped and how they shaped economic development in different parts of Europe see e.g.Ogilvie, "'Whatever … '"; Epstein, "Craft"; Ogilvie and Carus, "Institutions".12. Basel held a yearly trade fair, had longstanding economic ties with major trade hubs like Frankfurt and Amsterdam and was one of the main gateways for goods imported into the Swiss cantons.Tobler, "Dem Kaffee," 25-32.Engel, "Zwischen Produktion," 40-63.It was also the centre of a vibrant textile industry.For silk ribbons see Amstutz and Strebel, Seidenbande.For calico see Jean-Richard and Jedlicka, "Kattundrucke"; Siebenhüner, "Introduction," 17-23.Free trade was introduced during the Helvetic period in 1798 but revoked again in 1803, while export production and long-distance trade were much less restricted.For the role of guilds and merchants in Basel see Stolz, Wirtschaftspolitik.Stolz, Basler Wirtschaft, 136-43/150-7.13.Blome, "Offices"; Golob, "Das Zeitungskomptoir"; Feyel, L'annonce; Jones, "The Great Chain".14. Böning, "Magazine".15.However, they are still often overlooked, with Kwass for example making no mention of German advertisers even while referring to advertising in German fashion journals: Kwass, The Consumer, 94.Some examples of recent research using intelligence publications are Brauner, "Recommendation"; Fleischmann-Heck, "The 'Duisburger … '"; Jordan and Schopf, "Global Goods".Some earlier studies are: Homburg, "Warenanzeigen"; Homburg, "Werbung"; Jones, "The Great Chain".16.Over all categories and including repeat ads, the Avisblatt published between 27 (Avis-Blättlein (AB), 03.01.1730) and 373 (Wöchentliche Nachrichten aus dem Bericht-Haus zu Basel (AB), 31.10.1811)advertisements and notices.Sale advertisements were either posted under the header 'for sale' or under the catch-all 'general news', with the total here excluding the sale of real estate and repeat advertisements.The data on advertisements for food and drink used here was generated by tagging these advertisements according to dictionary functions tailored specifically to the Avisblatt data for a multitude of goods and transaction types, excluding repeat advertisements.The data set used for this article was generated in November 2022 with a preliminary version of the avisblatt R package using a snapshot of the processed Avisblatt data.The list of ids of all advertisements used for this study is available upon request.A complete Avisblatt data set with updated, improved and newly added meta data is now available under Burghartz et al, "Raw and Processed Data" and a public version of the avisblatt R package under Bannert et al. "avisblatt".For more information on the methodology of the Printed Markets project see Engel, "Patterns".For the project as well as a graphic interface to a simplified version of the Avisblatt database see https://avisblatt.philhist.unibas.ch/(available from December 2023).17.In 1758, advertising was restricted to inhabitants, except during the trade fair and the quarterly markets, StABS Protokolle: Kleiner Rat 131, 04.03.1758, 88-9.18. AB, 03.04.1834, 132.The Basel intelligence publication was published under different titles between 1729 and 1844.Each title will be referred to once in full and then as AB.Advertisements in the Avisblatt were published in German and sometimes in French.Translations into English are by the author, following the original wording as closely as possible.19.Jordan, "Global Goods"; Radeff, Du Café; Tobler, "Dem Kaffee"; Rossfeld, "Mit Stillstand".20.Wochentliche Nachrichten aus dem Baslerischen Bericht-Haus (AB), 18.11.1745,231.Other early advertisements from Specierer (grocer), e.g.AB, 26.02.1732; 17.06.1732;25.09.1732.21.This is especially prevalent in the marketing of medicinal products: see Cody, "'No Cure … '"; Porter, "The Language".22. Overkamp, "Polite Practices," 10. 23.Church, "Advertising," 628.24.Lyna and Van Damme, "A Strategy," 109-15.Murhem, "Advertising," 494.25.Imported products: chocolate, coffee, mineral water, tea, tobacco, tropical fruit, sugar and spices.The graphic excludes alcoholic beverages because these were produced both regionally and locally.26.Emma Hart argued that the infrequent arrival of imported goods was one of the main reasons advertising was more prevalent in the British American colonies.Hart, "A British," 120-3.27.Hauser might have advertised semi-anonymously afterwards by keeping his name and address out of the advertisement.

Table 1 .
Sale advertisements for all movable goods and for consumables published in the Basel Avisblatt.

Table 2 .
Framing of advertisements for consumables in the Basel Avisblatt.

Table 3 .
Mean number of tokens, categories and items per advertisement.

Table 4 .
Advertisements including at least one specific price point.

Table 5 .
Advertisements with geographic markers and counts of geographic markers to specific regions.

Table 6 .
Five most frequent food and drink categories described as popular, renowned or famous.
Notes 1. McKendrick, "Josiah"; McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, The Birth; Mui and Mui, Shops; Walker, "Advertising"; Cox, The Complete Tradesman; Lyna and Van Damme, "A Strategy"; Kwass, The Consumer, 89-94/ 213. 2. Kwass, for instance, states that most (English and French) advertising was focused on medicines, cosmetics, textiles, accessories, furniture and household goods, even though he often cites advertisements for imported consumables like tobacco, Kwass, The Consumer, 90/93.Two recent investigations of food advertising are a blog post by Maxine studying the advertising of sugar on trade cards, and an article studying the use of animal imagery for the sale of meat in the mid-nineteenth century.Berg, "Sweet Industriousness"; De Vriese et al., "Is It the Cow".3. By consumables I here understand foodstuffs and drink, including those sometimes consumed for health purposes, but not medicinal remedies and patent medicines.4. Stobart, Sugar, 168/176; Lyna and Van Damme, "A Strategy," 106. 5.For medicinal products: Jones, "The Great Chain"; Cody, "'No Cure … '"; Barker, "Medical".For books: der Weduwen, "Booksellers"; Benson, "Many".For textiles: Stobart, "Taste"; Schopf, "Selling".For art: Lyna, "Der Wert".For auctions: De Mulder, "London"; Lyna and Van Damme, "A Strategy"; Lyna, "Der Wert".6.Studies focusing on the German, let alone Swiss, retail trade before 1850 are practically nonexistent, and even research on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is rare.Such research mostly stresses the dominance of traditional market structuresguilds, fairs, marketplacesand the prevalence of itinerant trade before 1850, painting an altogether traditional or even stagnant picture, especially in comparison to the vibrant retail and shopping cultures and practices in Nortwestern Europe.Spiekermann, Basis; Pfister, "Vom Kiepenkerl"; Ogilvie, Küpker, and Maegraith, "Krämer"; Homburg, "German Landscapes".Only recently, this view is getting challenged; for elite consumption, see Overkamp, "Polite Practices".7. Hart, "A British"; Brauner, "Recommendation".