Living in a world where we’re surrounded by images all the time, it can come as a surprise to see that publications were often sparsely illustrated in the era before modern printing processes. That’s not to say that there weren’t plenty of published images circulating even in remote parts of America—one of the things that surprised me most while writing Mormon Visual Culture and the American West was realizing that nineteenth-century Utahns had access to a surprising abundance of art. But looking at a newspaper from early Utah is a stark reminder that images weren’t nearly as ubiquitous as we’re accustomed to today. If you picked up a newspaper in Utah before the 1890s, there’s a very good chance that the only images would be advertisements.
The first newspapers in the territory started without any images at all. Utah’s oldest paper, the Deseret News, went almost entirely unillustrated for years. Publishing a paper at all took enormous effort—the press and type had been purchased in Boston, shipped to Winter Quarters, Nebraska, and then hauled by ox cart to the Salt Lake Valley in 1849. From the paper’s first issue in 1850, it took nearly fifty years before illustrations of the news began regularly appearing on the front page. Near the end of the nineteenth century, halftone printing technology allowed periodicals to easily reproduce images through a photographic process. Before halftones, newspapers had to commission artists to make wood or metal engravings, requiring more time and expense, so illustrations of news events were a luxury.
Yet that didn’t mean that newspapers were nothing but text, even in territorial Utah. The vast majority of images weren’t news illustrations, though, but advertisements. Local publishers might not have been able to afford to commission many engravings, but they were being sent engraved printing plates all the time from advertisers. The Deseret News’ headlines for September 14, 1881 were about escaped prisoners, the death of President John Taylor’s son, and the construction of the Jordan and Salt Lake City Canal, but the image on the front page was an ad for “absolutely pure” Royal Baking Powder of New York (“Can be eaten by Dyspeptics without fear of the ills resulting from heavy indigestible foods”!)
Utah was part of a surprisingly active national marketing network. Especially after the advent of the railroad, firms based in major cities on both coasts and the Midwest promoted products that Utahns could purchase at local retailers or through mail. Although they might seem insignificant, they actually offer some fascinating historical insights, revealing what life was like in the era through the products that people consumed. Not surprisingly, given that the majority of nineteenth-century Utahns worked in agriculture, farm implements were among the most commonly advertised products, ranging from obvious essentials like plows, to heavier infrastructure like windmills, both of which were advertised in the Deseret News on Feb. 21, 1871.
Most of these advertisers employed straightforward images of their products at use, but some created more sophisticated images to appeal to prospective buyers. The Monitor Cooking Stove Corporation, for example, set the title of their firm within a finely detailed woodcut illustrating the company’s namesake—the famed Union “ironclad.”
Another popular category of products were cosmetics, toiletries, and medications—small items that could easily ship through the mail. Beyond the horrifying thoughts of exactly what was in Dr. B. F. Sherman’s Prickly Ash Bitters, these sorts of ads provide important evidence about aspects of the domestic realm that have often been overlooked, while reminding us that women were important readers and consumers in the era despite their lack of visibility in the historical record.
Initially, national firms had the advantage when it came to illustrated advertisements since they had better access to engravers and more funding for stylish marketing campaigns. Some local businesses tried to compete by publishing cleverly composed advertisements that create visual interest solely through the arrangement of type, like ZCMI’s 1884 ad for household textiles and wallpapers, which employs a variety of typefaces, strategic framing, and even playful backward text to stand out visually from the surrounding newspaper copy (ZCMI was the LDS Church-owned Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution).
Some local businesses invested in engraved plates for advertising, like Dinwoody Furniture, which likely sent a photograph of their building to an eastern engraving firm as the basis of the image they used in advertisements in the mid 1880s. By the turn of the century, halftone imaging made it vastly easier and less expensive for local businesses to create their own advertising imagery, which, as a 1903 ad for DeBouzek Engraving reveals, they could even have done locally in Salt Lake City.
Occasionally, advertisements were in tension with the editorial stance of the periodicals they supported. While Brigham Young was chiding Latter-day Saint women for purchasing ready-made clothing from the east—depleting the territory’s currency reserves in order to feed their vanity, as he saw it—Utah newspapers were advertising clothing in the latest fashions available for mail order from New York. My favorite example of this kind of disjuncture comes from the Juvenile Instructor, a quasi-Church children’s magazine published by George Q. Cannon. In an 1896 editorial, “Bicycle Riding,” Cannon relayed a conversation he had with “leading officers of the Church concerning the sin of fornication,” in which Church leaders agreed that one of the primary causes was “the intimacy which had grown up among young people of both sexes in bicycle riding.” Girls, in particular, he believed were susceptible to the vices introduced by bicycle riding: “Girls may be thrown into society by riding bicycles that they would not meet with under other circumstances, and would perhaps shun if it were in the ordinary intercourse of society.” While Cannon recognized the practical and physical benefits of biking, he was still adamant that “parents and guardians should exercise the greatest of care in allowing their daughters or those in their charge to go out riding on bicycles unless properly attended.”
An advertisement in the very same issue seemed to offer a different perspective, promoting the “Ladies’ Rambler, Model D” bicycle with the enticing heading, “Do You Want a Bicycle? LOOK AT THIS”
Beyond offering a humorous example of the competing viewpoints expressed in Latter-day Saint publications, the ad makes explicit a fundamental quality that helps explain the power of illustrated advertising. In inviting readers to “look at this,” the advertisement encourages us to indulge the sensory stimulus of vision as we engage a different kind of looking than we had been employing while reading the text, allowing ourselves to imagine the bicycle as a physical, tactile object. The engraved bicycle attracts our attention not only because it stands out from the text that fills most of the publication, but because it elicits desire through the sensory stimulation activated by visual representation.
Even if their original intent was simply to motivate consumption, advertisements offer surprisingly rich insight about the past. They give us a visual record of people’s needs, desires, and aspirations, sometimes in accordance with the institutional voices that directed their world, and sometimes in defiance of those voices. In studying the visual culture of historical media, it’s tempting to skip past the ads to get to the “important” illustrations, but paying attention to advertising can yield surprising insight.