From the beginning of 1729 until March 1845, the Basel Avisblatt was published initially weekly; and in the very last few years, evn more frequently. It is one of the few advertising journals from the 18th and early 19th centuries that has been completely preserved.
The Avis-Blättlein was first published in January 1729 by Johann Burckhardt. The year before, he had received permission from the Basel City Council to open a so-called Adresse-Comptoir (report house) and to print an advertising journal. On this private initiative, Basel thus became the first city in the Swiss Confederation and one of the first German-speaking cities to receive a so-called Intelligenzblatt (intelligencer) in the form of a pure advertising journal.
From 1733, Burckhardt published the paper as Hoch-Obrigkeitlich privilegiertes Donnerstag-Wochenblättlein; in 1750 he changed the title to Wöchentliche Nachrichten aus dem Berichthaus zu Basel.
After Burckhardt's death in 1753, his son-in-law, Peter Raillard, took over the privilege and continued to run the newspaper and the reporting house until his own death in 1779. The paper was then taken over by Raillard's widow and daughter of Johann Burckhardt, Susanna Raillard-Burckhardt. After she had died, her son Peter Raillard Jr. edited the paper. His widow, Anna Katharina Raillard-Meyenrock, took over after the death of her husband in 1824. She finally handed over the business to her nephew, Theodor Raillard-Weiss, in 1835, who published the paper until the end of March 1845. From April 1845, the advertising paper became a political newspaper with an advertising section, which was published daily as Allgemeines Intelligenzblatt der Stadt Basel by the Schweighauser'sche Buchhandlung.
From the start, the Avisblatt contained sections for buying and selling, lost and found property, lend and rent (mostly housing), and a variety of other offers and requests. The Adresse-Comptoir, aka Berichthaus, served as an information and placement office and connected the readers of advertisements with their advertisers; it also served as a warehouse and made sales offers in its own name. In addition to advertisements and offers, the Avisblatt also informed the people of Basel about the weekly prices of basic foodstuffs, elections to office, and delivered annual vital statistics. It published wedding and funeral announcements as well as public notices and mixed news. So while the paper was primarily used by private advertisers to publish offers and requests, the Basel authorities also used the Avisblatt until for official announcements until the times of the Helvetic Republic, and disseminated data compilations in the 'pre-statistical' age.
The paper is preserved in three complete series in the Basel University Library and the Basel-Stadt State Archives. This, and the inclusion of an annual index prepared at the time by the editor for a number of years, shows that the Basler Avisblatt became a special memory institution, especially for personal information about Basel's urban society.
