PUBLISHERS PAST: PHARMA PRODUCT PLACEMENT SHOCK!

One of this blog's areas of interest is in publishers past. I'm working on a book proposal PUBLISH AND BE DAMNED which will look at the actual publishers of controversial and dangerous books...and occasionally this blog will feature publishers from the past. As a trained historian, one of my interests is how nothing is that new in the world..and that is certainly true in an industry that has been around a good eight hundred years.

So today we feature John Newbery.  Sure, that name is familiar - it's this John Newbery

The Newbery Medal has been presented since 1922 by the ALA to "the most distinguished American children's book published the previous year". And why? because John Newbery is credited with being the first ever publisher of illustrated books for children. Newbery started his publishing operation in Reading, Berkshire around 1740 and soon moved to premises in St.Paul's Churchyard, which had always been a center for bookselling and publishing. He published - and perhaps wrote the first Mother Goose, the History of Goody Two Shoes and other books intended not just to instruct but to entertain children.

But like so many publishers over the ages, it wasn't so easy to make a living from that alone. He had a side business as a wholesale and retail druggist, and it was in this capacity that he met Robert James. James was a physician and inventor, author of A Medicinal Dictionary, with a History of Drugs, which featured contributions from Dr Johnson, no less, and in 1746 he hired Newbery as sales agent for his new invention that made his fortune, James' fever powder which was of course supposed to cure almost everything...The powder was infamous enough to be throughly investigated by the Royal Society in 1791.
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Horace Walpole and others extolled its virtues. But Newbery had the foresight to take his advertising for the new product a stage further, what we would deem as Product Placement (or, forgive the pun, a Powder Puff). And for all we moan about product placement in kids movies and TV shows as a modern phenomenon, we're not even close to the sheer gall of John Newbery..


One of his most successful childrens books was The History of Little Goody Two Shoes., the inspiring story of an orphan girl who only has one shoe until she meets the man of her dreams who gives her a pair...Project Gutenberg has a facsimile of Newbery's third edition of the book - there were to be many more. 

Chapter One of course sees the poor girl orphaned, with the woodcut above...and the very first sentence reads:

Care and Discontent shortened the Days of Little Margery's Father.--He was forced from his Family, and seized with a violent Fever in a Place where Dr. James's Powder was not to be had, and where he died miserably.

I defy my readers to come up with a more blatant pharma product placement than that - and indeed not only James, but Newbery himself, made his fortune from the powder, not the book. Nothing is new...

Nick W-W