Hearts
Vacant

New Zealanders looking for a husband or wife once bought a few lines in the classifieds. Every word cost money, so they had to decide what was worth saying. These notices come from 955 columns in the Papers Past archive, published between 1870 and 1945.

01 Read the notices, keep the ones you like 02 Write your own and see what it would have cost

The pitch moved from money to sincerity

Share of notices using each selling point, by era. In the 1800s the strongest thing you could say about yourself was that you had means and were respectable. By the 1930s people were more likely to say they were genuine, refined, or plainly lonely. The word friendship barely existed before 1920.

Fifty-six notices

Tap a notice to keep it. Kept notices turn gold and collect in the tray, so you can come back to the phrasing when you write your own.

Your turn

Write one, and pay for it

In 1917 the Marlborough Express charged a shilling for twelve words, then a penny for each extra word. Write your own notice below. The page works out the price, checks it against the selling points in the archive and estimates which era it most resembles.

Words0

It would cost—

You sound like—

Nothing written yet.

Rate card: Marlborough Express, 11 January 1917

The papers also reported what happened next

The papers also reported, sometimes with obvious relish, what happened to people who answered the notices.

Source. Notices recovered from the National Library's Papers Past via the DigitalNZ API, non-commercial, with thanks. Searches ran on the vocabulary of the genre: view to matrimony, wishes to correspond, respectable widower, object matrimony.
The chart counts all 955 candidate columns the search returned, not the hand-picked notices below it, so the trend is not a product of my taste. Each column can hold several notices, so read the percentages as the share of columns containing a word rather than of individual advertisers.
Transcription. The archive's text is OCR of century-old newsprint. Transcripts repair spacing, case and obvious scanner errors, and nothing else. The linked scan is authoritative and always one click away.
Clippings live in your browser and nowhere else. The share link lists the numbers you kept.
On the people. Everyone here has been dead for decades. They paid to put these words in a newspaper for strangers to read; I have treated them as personal ads, not curiosities.

Adventures in Comms · Issue 02, 01 willedmonds.com The Lab