For Marketing Professionals

If you are interested in the history of marketing, there is a great deal of material about the early years of print culture (1450-1650) in Humanism for Sale. At this point, you can find plenty of examples here, but you will need to use the Table of Contents, look at my discussion, and then follow the links to the footnotes and bibliography (330 KB pdf).

Way too cumbersome! So I want to do better for you.

Eventually, I will offer a table of Marketing Contents, with links to translated documents and case studies. Meanwhile, if you have specific suggestions for what should be included, I would be happy to hear from you. Some things I already have in mind to discuss:

Title pages were the principal site for marketing books, using advertising blurbs.

Indexes -- still rare at the beginning of the period -- were frequently touted as selling points.

Printer's prefaces and afterwords offer explanations of what innovations were on offer.

Printer's marks were important for marketing and for communication between printers and readers.

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