From the foregoing can be traced the gradual growth of street advertising until it has reached its present extensive pitch; and though the process may be characterised as slow, no one who looks around at the well-covered hoardings and the be-plastered signs on detached and prominent houses can doubt that it is sure. Proclamations, and suchlike official announcements, were probably the first specimens of street advertising, as we now understand the term; but it was not until printing became general, and until the people became conversant with the mysteries of reading and writing, that posters and handbills were to any extent used. Mention is made in 1679 of a tradesman named Jonathan Holder, haberdasher, of the city of London, who gave to every purchaser to the extent of a guinea a printed list of the articles kept in stock by him, with the prices affixed. The paper in which this item of news was recorded seems to have regarded Mr Holder’s practice as a dangerous innovation, and remarks that it would be quite destructive to trade if shopkeepers lavished so much of their capital in printing useless bills. This utterance now seems ridiculous; but in the course of another two centuries many orthodox opinions of the present day will receive as complete a downfall as that just recorded.
Within the recollections of men who are still young street advertising has considerably changed. Twenty years ago the billsticker was a nuisance of the most intolerable kind, and though we can hardly now consider him a blessing, his habits have changed very much for the better. Never heeding the constant announcement to him to beware, the billsticker cared nothing for the privacy of dead walls, or, for the matter of that, of dwelling-houses and street doors; and though he was hardly ever himself to be seen, his disfigurative work was a prominent feature of the metropolis. It was also considered by him a point of honour—if the term may be used in connection with billstickers—to paste over the work of a rival; and so the hoardings used to present the most heterogeneous possible appearance, and though bills were plentiful, their intelligibility was of a very limited description. Sunday morning early used to be a busy