The advertisement Mark Twain inserted into The Innocents Abroad

Thu, 08 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Mark Twain’s story of the Wandering Jew in Chapter 54 of the The Innocents Abroad says their guide pointed out a mark left on a wall by the Wandering Jew, which read:

S T.—1860—X.

It isn’t dwelt on in the book, probably because everyone in the United States reading the book understood the joke immediately.

In the 1860s, a company called P.B. Drake & Co. created a massive guerrilla advertising campaign. The campaign started by simply placing the above cryptic text on the sides of buildings and even rocks. New Hampshire even had to pass a law banning advertisements that defaced natural settings, after Drake painting their ad on the side of the White Mountains. After the company generated enough interest in what the cryptic text was, it finally added the name of their product, Drake’s Plantation Bitters. They then started advertising in newspapers across the county. You can see one advertisement on the front page of the New York Times (June 28, 1862):

Drakes-Plantation-Bitters on Quint Books

The advertisement Mark Twain inserted into The Innocents Abroad