In an attempt to determine what would be an appropriate format for advertising in The Moderne Aviso , I set about to find some examples of period advertising. While I did not conduct exhaustive research on the topic, I did spend a day in the University of Delaware Library and talked with several people who have been studying the period. What I found was a few trade cards and a couple of flyers, but nothing that would be comparable to the kinds of advertisements that are usually seen in modern magazines. In fact, none of the advertising was contained in publications, and samples of advertisements are somewhat scarce.
Trade cards are basically an early form of the business card.
As you can see in the facsimiles below, the cards contain name, address, and occupation information, but can also contain information about the wares that the merchant produces. They contain a relatively large quantity of information and include illustrations. Unfortunately, the two samples, illustrated below, were the only two advertisements to be found in two volumes of woodcuts. While the information I found is scant, I have been thoroughly disheartened in the attempt. Instead of going on a quest to find more samples, I decided to draw my conclusions from the flimsy evidence before.