ise. Typically, the promotional activities of professional practitioners were confined to specialty announcements, also called "tombstone" display ads in local newspapers that would announce the establishment or relocation of offices in the community or the affiliation of new associates or partners in a practice. Tombstone ads were a mark of the dignity and understatement associated with the practice of professional crafts, a feature of the social esteem in which practitioners as a class were held.
There was, of course, also the fact that the service professions were for most of the twentieth century legally barred from engaging in conventional advertising. Along with the evidence of some professional-service advertising in the 1980s and 1990s, this indirectly argues that more promotion-minded professional folk had always made a virtue of necessity. Another method of promotion for professional practitioners has historically been more subtle, if less noticed. Nothing about the de jure ban on professional-services advertising prevented some practitioners from becoming highly promoted by reason of a high public profile. Publication of books for the professional, educational, and popular press, as well as publication of research or praxis articles in the journals of professional societies or in the popular mass media and functioning as legal or medical expert advisors for broadcast news and other creative mass media, have long been a familiar fixture of the professional presence in the culture. This would explain why lawyers such as F. Lee Bailey, whose fame as an attorney increased according as the notoriety of his cases and clients (Sam Shepard, Patty Hearst, O.J. Simpson) increased over the years, became famous would not need to engage in display or direct-mail advertising or take notice of Supreme Court decisions affecting the legality of such promotion on the part of other lawyers. In countries where advertising of professional serv...