Pierce 1898 Advertisement — Putnam & Sprague Co., the Pierce Line with Prices

PUTNAM & SPRAGUE CO.,

247 and 249 Main St.

PIERCE LEADER

Up-to-Date, high grade,

$42.00.

Regular Pierce Cycles.

$46.00.

These cycles are thoroughly 1898 in every respect. They are honestly built, of the best materials, and offered at a popular price without degrading the product. They have all the light running qualities peculiar to Pierce Cycles, and in finish, style and quality are the equal of any.

Pierce Road Racer.

$64.00.

To those who are speedy or ambitious on the road, to those who want a reliable light wheel, or to light-weight every-day riders, our racer, with the wide choice of equipment offered, will appeal as nearly cycle perfection. These models have been tried and can be depended upon for all-around work.

Pierce Pneumatic Cushion Frame Cycles.

$65.00.

In recommending to the public these models, we do so with the knowledge that they represent one of the great strides toward perfection in cycle construction. The advantages are as marked as between an ordinary wagon and a rubber-tired carriage. Especially will this appeal to women and men who have felt the ill effects of the jarring of rigid frames. We have placed these at a popular price because we believe the people want them.

Pierce Tandems.

$100.00.

These models will recommend themselves to all tandem riders as honest, reliable and safe. They are built for hard service, but at the same time are stylish and trim. They are capable of great speed without straining the frame or breaking down. We believe the people want tandems at a popular price, and we have tried to meet the demand.

Liberal Terms of Payment.

Every Wheel Fully Guaranteed.

[Two engravings flank the PIERCE LEADER headline. At the left a man and a woman ride away from the reader, she in a boater and full skirt; at the right two racing men are crouched over dropped bars, the nearer one head-on.]

[A single column of advertising from page 10 of the Worcester Daily Spy for 23 April 1898, cropped out of the newspaper page. It is the first Pierce document in this archive, and the first document here drawn from Chronicling America at the Library of Congress.

It is a dealer’s advertisement rather than the maker’s own, and the George N. Pierce Company of Buffalo is nowhere named on it. That is exactly what makes it useful. A retailer had no reason to set out a supplier’s whole range unless the range itself was the argument, and this column prices four Pierce product families in one place at the height of the American bicycle boom: the Leader at $42, Regular Pierce Cycles at $46, the Road Racer at $64, the Pneumatic Cushion Frame at $65 and Tandems at $100. A maker’s catalog states a range. A dealer’s column proves what a customer in one American city could actually be sold, and at what price, in a named month.

The cushion frame is the paragraph worth reading twice. It is the feature Pierce built its reputation on, and the copy argues it as comfort rather than speed, in a comparison drawn from the carriage trade the reader already understood — as marked as between an ordinary wagon and a rubber-tired carriage. Pierce is selling suspension to people who had never been offered it. The archive’s Pierce Timeline dates the Hygienic Cushion Frame chainless to 1901, three years after this sheet, so the cushion frame here is the earlier pneumatic-cushion chain model rather than the shaft-drive machine.

The same advertisement ran at least three times in the same newspaper that week — 23, 28 and 30 April 1898 — and this record cites the earliest impression held. The three scans were compared and are of equal quality, so the choice is one of date and not of legibility. There may well be earlier impressions in the run that were not surveyed.

The transcription follows the sheet, including its own punctuation. The body text was set from the Library of Congress machine OCR and then read line by line against the image at native resolution, which is why this record is marked as machine text checked by eye rather than as transcription. The machine text for this page is poor — it renders dollar signs as figures throughout — and every price above was read off the image.]