"Old Pete says you are the best seedsman in this world's paradise..."
This early James J. H. Gregory catalog is humble compared to the colorful catalogs in the next two decades. (Not that Gregory ever got into the luxurious color lithos like most other dealers.)
I don't know about you but I love to read testimonials, even when I don't care about what the folks are commenting on! This back page from Gregory's 1870 annual seed catalog was too much for me to ignore, so I'm sharing it. The 19th century advertisers used testimonials quite often in their catalogs.
Online testimonials such as Amazon.com posts on each product has brought them back into use more, not that they ever disappeared. They differ now in that negative comments are there as well. It doesn't seem to matter to buyers, then and now, that you can't trust testimonials - they are just nice to read!
