From the Archive Desk
How Old Newspaper Personal Ads Worked
Before profiles and swipes, strangers met through a few lines of small type and a box number. Here is how the system worked.
For a very long time, one of the most practical ways for a single adult to reach beyond their own neighborhood was a few lines of small type in a newspaper. Personal advertisements — "personals," "matrimonial notices," or, later, "lonely hearts" ads — let strangers introduce themselves to an entire readership and wait to see who would write back.
Early beginnings
Advertisements from people seeking a husband or wife appeared in English periodicals as far back as the late seventeenth century; a notice printed in the 1690s in John Houghton's trade sheet, A Collection for Improvement of Husbandry and Trade, is often cited as one of the earliest. Over the following centuries, as newspapers multiplied and literacy spread, notices of this kind became a familiar, if sometimes gossiped-about, part of the classified pages on both sides of the Atlantic. Some publications were devoted almost entirely to matrimonial advertising.
Not every personal notice was romantic. Classified "personal" columns also carried messages to estranged relatives, coded notes between friends and appeals for lost belongings, which is why such columns were sometimes read as entertainment by people with no intention of answering anything.
The box number
The single most important invention in the history of personal ads was the box number. Instead of printing their name and address, an advertiser paid the newspaper to hold replies. Each notice ended with a reference, such as "Box 214, this office." Anyone who wished to answer wrote a letter, sealed it, wrote the box number on the envelope and mailed it to the newspaper.
The paper then collected the replies for each box and either held them for the advertiser to pick up or forwarded them in a fresh envelope. The advertiser read the letters in private and chose whom, if anyone, to answer — and only at that point decided how much of themselves to reveal. The replier, meanwhile, had shared only what they chose to put in their letter.
That arrangement solved two problems at once. It protected the advertiser's privacy from the whole readership, and it put a small, useful barrier of effort in front of anyone wishing to respond. Writing and posting a letter took more thought than a passing remark, which tended to filter out the merely curious.
Paying by the word
Classified advertising was usually priced by the word or by the line, often with a minimum charge. That simple fact shaped the whole style of the personals. Advertisers squeezed as much meaning as they could into as few words as possible, which gave rise to the compressed shorthand many people still recognize.
Abbreviations varied by country, publication and decade, but they typically covered marital status (S for single, D for divorced, W for widowed), habits (N/S for non-smoker), and stock phrases such as ISO, "in search of," and GSOH, "good sense of humor." A complete notice might read something like: "W, 58, N/S, fond of gardens and old films, ISO kind gentleman 55–65 for letters and friendship. GSOH. Box 214." Every word earned its place.
Categories and conventions
Newspapers organized notices into headings so readers could find what interested them — for example, women seeking men, men seeking women, friendship and pen pals — and, over time and in some publications, headings for same-sex correspondence as well. Many papers had rules about what could be printed. Explicit content was refused, and advertisers were generally expected not to include direct contact details, which would defeat the purpose of the box number.
Some publications screened notices before printing, and reputable ones would refuse obviously fraudulent or offensive advertisements. The standards varied widely, which is one reason the personals carried a slightly risqué reputation in some eras and a perfectly respectable one in others.
Risks then, risks now
The system was never risk-free. Newspapers in many countries reported cases of fraud in which someone used a romantic correspondence to win trust and then ask for money — the same pattern that consumer-protection agencies warn about today in online romance scams. The tools have changed; the basic warning sign has not. A correspondent who asks for money is a correspondent to stop answering. Our guide to meeting someone safely through letters sets out the modern precautions.
Why the format lasted
Personal ads persisted through the twentieth century, migrating from newspapers into magazines, then to telephone voice-mail services and eventually to the internet, where they became the ancestors of today's dating profiles. Each new medium made introductions faster. Along the way, something was lost: the patience that the slow back-and-forth of letters imposed, and the sense that a reply had been composed with care.
That is the idea behind The Lonely Hearts Gazette™: to keep what worked about the old personals — anonymous box numbers, short notices written in your own words, replies by letter — and pair it with modern privacy protections and moderation. You can see how a modern sample edition looks in our e-edition, or browse the sample personals.
Reading old personals today
If you come across old personal columns in a library's newspaper archive, read them with sympathy. Behind each compressed line was a real person taking a small risk in public, hoping that somewhere among the readers was someone who would take the trouble to write back. In that, at least, nothing has changed.
The Lonely Hearts Gazette is a proposed letter-based personals service and is not open yet. This column is general information, not legal, financial or professional advice.