Recently, while looking for any coverage of George F. Plant, a businessman and Selma politician (serving as a councilman and mayor,), I saw some cryptic strings of letters and numbers at the bottom of most of the advertisements. Puzzled, I abandoned poor Mr. Plant to dive into the world of what The Printer’s Dictionary of Technical Terms describes as “blind dates”.

Some of what I’ve been able to suss out:

“d6mo” — runs daily for six months
“aug26tf” – runs in every paper until the issuer cancels the contract. TF means ’til forbid’.
‘sept24d1m” = runs daily for one month, beginning from Sept 24
“sept20d&wtf” = runs daily and weekly beginning Sept 20 ’til forbid’/contract is cancelled.

I’ve been looking at books like The Encyclopedia of the Mail Order Business and The Printers Dictionary of Technical Terms. I haven’t found a source that focuses just on these ‘blind dates’, they’re fairly easy to spot when they’re included in lowercase. (This is not always the case: MacGregor’s Book of Bank Advertising sticks its few blind dates in with everyone else.)

The New York Times Typographical Standards guide spotlights a few: