were often women who worked for the theatre by selling oranges as refreshments to audiences. It has been alluded to that these women were also prostitutes. However, there was still a large rate of illiteracy among theatre goers. This resulted in companies of actors traversing urban streets with a beating drum while announcing upcoming venues. By the 19th century, the programmes, similar to today's, were being printed. However, the earlier playbills of the 18th century still contained more designs and information about a production. By 1884, advertisements had become a standard feature in playbills. Beginning in New York City, the first company to specialize in printing theatrical programmes was founded by an Ohio business man, Frank Vance Strauss. By 1911, the company was called the Strauss Magazine Theatre Program. On September 23, 1920, the company, then known as the New York Theatre Program Corporation, advertised its sales at a million and a half per month. This corporation was the early foundation for the modern day magazine, Playbill. During World War II, British theatre programmes underwent a dramatic change as the government placed restrictions over paper use. The programme turned back into a single sheet of paper folded over once to efficiently create four available pages for text. Not until the 1970s were photo printed programmes available and widely distributed at British theatres. The American Playbill did not suffer as severely during the second World War and was still published at a regular rate. Theatre programmes have become very valuable articles of information for a city or nation's cultural history. An example is Australia's celebration in 2008 over the returning of its earliest surviving document from Canada, which was a theatre playbill from 1796. The playbill advertised the production of The Tragedy of Jane Shore. George Hughes, a convict aboard the First Fleet, printed the playbill using Australia’s first printing press. In September 2017, the British Library opened its "In the Spotlight" project, showcasing a portion of its significant collection of playbills dating from the 1730s to the 1950s. Some of the library's collection of approximately 234,000 playbills, bound into over 1000 volumes, were digitised and made accessible online. The public were asked, via the project website, to help "bring them back into the spotlight". Sporting events At professional sporting events, programmes are often sold, and contain information about the teams competing. In the United Kingdom, football programmes are issued by