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.
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