Remember how I said that the vast majority of missed connection ads were from men? Well, there were some from women. Here are two, both from the 1870s:

The text is here:More...

If the gentleman who met a lady corner of Broadway and Twenty-second street, and accompanied her from there to M… Read full post »

I am leaving for my ten-year college reunion in a few hours (let's not discuss how I feel about that!) so there will be no post tomorrow, though I will try for Sunday afternoon. However, I thought I'd leave you with this ad to ruminate on over the weekend:

All I…

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A couple readers who are, apparently, far more cynical than I am read yesterday's advertiser as more of a sleazeball who was trying to pick up a woman on the street and hopefully get laid. I'd be far more inclined to agree if he hadn't taken the trouble to apologize…

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I ran across this ad while looking for something else entirely and was really struck by it. I'd never seen anything like this before: an ad to a total stranger with no address given. Which means, of course, no reply was expected.

Here is the text:More...

The gentleman who yesterday afternoon/… Read full post »

I noticed people seem to be intrigued by the "missed connection" ads, so I thought I'd put up a few more for your enjoyment. These are just two I found interesting, and I'll continue posting them as we go along.



As always, I have written out the text here:More...

Waverly Theatre.-Lady dr… Read full post »

While letters in response to advertisements are extremely rare, I do have somewhere around 300. Some are from newspaper articles in which reporters, like the one I mentioned below, posted a matrimonial ad and then published the responses (oh-so-kindly removing any identifying details, as if that wou…

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If you're interested in reading what one critic had to say about ads like the ones directly below, here's a great example that's pretty darn amusing, if you ask me:

"...it is terrible that our boys and girls should have their curiosity sharpened upon forbidden subjects by having so-called 'advertiseme… Read full post »

These two ads far predate the ones that I wrote about a few days ago when I wrote about advertising for sex.
The difference, naturally, is that these two involve people who were already going at it!

The text of both ads is here: More...

Will the young lady that used to meet Mr.… Read full post »

Short one today.

I keep wanting to show you all a more typical matrimonial ad, but then I run across ones that are so funny that I have to share. So here's another, not rhyming, but still pretty awesome.

The text is written out here:More...

A young man about twenty-four years of age,… Read full post »

When I first started doing research for this project, the paper I was using only had matrimonial ads from men, so imagine my surprise when I started working with another paper and found hundreds from women! Most of them are pretty straightforward, but here are three that I find particularly…

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Doing additional research for Chapter Two I just ran across this quote in the Kansas City Star in 1899. This really encapsulates what a lot of other people were saying at the time, so I thought I'd put it up here so you could see an example of what the…

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Well yesterday was an exciting day for Advertising for Love, thanks to some fantastic person who linked here from MetaFilter, which has given me more hits in one day than I was hoping for in a month! So thanks for that, welcome, and I hope you'll all stick around!

I mentioned…

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Sometimes it's the simplest ones that grab you the most:



Aw. That matrimonial ad was one of the first ones I found, I think even before Bertram's, and I still remember how touched I was. Poor lonely guy. I hope he found who he was looking for.

As for the…

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This one kills me. Even Bertram would have been impressed. I mean, the dude is rhyming! Not very well, to be sure, but still! You should be able to read it if you click on it, but I've written it out below the cut:
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A Valentine - Ladies fair,… Read full post »

I'm about to head out for a 10-day trip to Portugal and Amsterdam, but wanted to leave you all with one last post to ponder until I get back - at which time I will launch this blog's big debut!

This one reminds me a lot of Charlie's ad, but for reasons…

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The ad that started it all.

Actually what really started it all was my friend J, who told me one day as I was desperately trying to come up with a dissertation topic that she'd love to read a book about the history of classifieds. Turned out that she was interested in… Read full post »

I got an interesting comment to the entry I wrote about Charlie that immediately got me wondering: what would T.S. Eliot have made of that ad? Was Charlie, in fact, none other than an earlier version of J. Alfred Prufrock? My imaginative commenter saw Charlie as a lonely, bespectacled…

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Some lovely person set up an RSS feed on LJ, for anyone coming from there who's interested in linking to it. The site is adverts_4_love.

In any case, I will be posting again later this afternoon, and about once a day from here on out.

I'm so thankful for the overwhelmingly positive…

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I'm suddenly getting a ton of hits from Live Journal...I'm not really sure where those are coming from, but welcome! I have a (friends-only) blog there as well at calliope_nyc, come check it out.

©2009 Pam Epstein

Do I even need to editorialize?

These come from a slightly later era than what I've been posting so far (1900, to be precise, but who's keeping track?), both on the same day, in fact, but ads like this date as far back as the 1860s. Don't worry, there will be/…

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I recently did an interview about this and I don't want to steal the reporter's thunder (though she'll have more readers than I do anyhow), but I have to introduce yet another kind of personal that I've been researching: nineteenth-century "missed connections." Yes, like the ones on Craigslis…

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Charlie's ad was just an example - however unique - of what I've been calling "correspondence" ads. When that letter appeared in the newspaper, I'm sure it surprised its readers, but they would have been used to seeing this type of notice before. In fact, readers would have seen/…

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These two ads date from November 24 and November 27, 1861. The first one is a little more run-of-the-mill, although there are a few things that are pretty amusing - "any good or ugly looking lady" is not the sort of thing you see in personal ads, really, ever. And… Read full post »

One of the most fascinating, as well as the most frustrating, issues that you have to deal with when working with sources like this is that of legitimacy. The ad by Don Zacharias is just one of plenty of examples of ads that I think - and in rare occasions…

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