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Advertisements
By the middle
of the nineteenth century Bengali Children’s books had
emerged as a niche segment in
the larger business of the book
trade. As in any competitive
market, advertisements in varied
forms and guises became the
chief instrument for selling the
wares. In his recently published
volume on the popular spects of
nineteenth century Bengali
publications, Professor Gautam Bhadra
observes that in the latter half
of the century, the Bengali
equivalents of captions like
‘preface’ or ‘introduction’
began to be replaced by words
like ‘advertisement’ or
‘announcement’.
Text books printed
endorsements by well-known
educationists and advertised
certified approvals - often from
office-holders like the Director
of Public Instruction - as a way
of impressing the prospective
buyer. Sometimes publishers also
appended additional pages for
inserting advertisements of
available and forthcoming
titles. Such advertisements
provide us with important
indicators of readerships and
popularity of particular titles
and become crucial records of
evidence for books and their
prices.
With the emergence of the child
as a reader,for whom
reading was not only the means
towards an education and a
livelihood but increasingly also
a pastime and an entertainment,
there developed a market for
publishing pleasurable books for
children. Following the market
of children’s leisure reading,
was the inevitable development
of a larger market where
children were seen as consumers.
The juvenile periodicals at the
turn of the century printed
commercials advertising a
variety of products related to
or used by children such as
toys, musical instruments,
sports goods, syrups, hair oils
and body lotions. Full page
advertisements of Delkhosh
essence or Kuntalin hair oil
from the house of “H. Bose,
Perfumer, Calcutta”, Bengal
Chemical syrups (a firm founded
by the leading scientist
Prafulla Chandra Ray) or those
of the Athletic Store selling
“swadeshi [indigenously manufactured]
football, bats and balls” were
some of the commonest
commercials appearing in
children’s magazines.
Among the crowd of book
advertisements that jostled for
attention in the pages of
juvenile publications in the
early twentieth century, those
for Dakshinaranjan Mitra
Majumdar’s volumes deserve
special mention. An artist,
illustrator and an author, Mitra Majumdar
himself designed the
advertisements of his
Matrigranthabali titles. Also
important were the neatly
printed book advertisements from
firms like U. Ray and Sons and
Sisir Publishing House.
The link at the top will lead
you to a series of
advertisements that appeared in
Bengali children’s books and
were a strategic part of the
niche trade in the nineteenth
and early twentieth century
period.
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