Selling Character: Trade Papers, Modernity, and The Maclean Publishing Company, 1887-1910s

Abstract

This dissertation explores the gendered dimensions of the growth of trade papers and trade paper advertising in Canada from 1887 until the 1910s using the lens of the Maclean Publishing Company. In 1887 John Bayne Maclean established The Canadian Grocer. The paper advised retail grocers on how best to succeed in the growing, ever-competitive retail environment, but Maclean’s ultimate goal was to profit from the paper through the sale of advertising space. In the late 1880s and 1890s, Maclean would establish and acquire additional trade papers including Books and Notions, Hardware, The Canadian Dry Goods Review, and Printer and Publisher, creating Canada’s most successful trade paper publishing company of the period. Maclean faced many challenges to building his business, including an initial level of distrust surrounding trade papers themselves and manufacturers’ initial refusal to purchase advertising space. This thesis seeks to explore the ways in which Maclean sought to overcome these impediments

Employing the Maclean trade journals, the Maclean-Hunter archival records, and the John Bayne Maclean papers as source material, this dissertation demonstrates how notions of manhood that were popularized in success literature beginning in the 1860s were used to sell advertising space, build the company’s readership base, Maclean’s own reputation, and that of his trade papers. The first chapter establishes context, providing the history of the Canadian trade paper field. The second chapter is a discursive analysis of Maclean trade paper content, demonstrating the ways in which Maclean applied notions of character to build his reputation as a publisher and grow his readership base. The third chapter explores Maclean’s use of nascent public relations techniques to publicize company policies to articulate his desire to serve the success of the retailers, wholesalers, and manufacturers he served. The fourth chapter explores personal and textual advertising space sales tactics. Here Maclean argued that advertising was akin to masculine performance and provided potential advertisers with the directives needed to articulate who they were as men through their advertising practices. This dissertation contributes to the historiography on gender and business in Canada by underscoring the ways in which masculinity influenced the emergence of trade paper advertising, trade paper publishing, and consumer culture more broadly.