The Heyday of the Penny Press
We have been discussing free speech, social media, and community the past few days here at Prufrock. To continue the conversation for one more day: In The New York Review of Books, Batya Ungar-Sargon writes about the heyday of the penny press and the history of The Sun:
Like many such ventures, the Daily Sentinel struggled with factionalism, but, above all, it struggled to make sales. Although there was already a high level of literacy among Americans, who were the most literate people in the world at that time, for many, the Daily Sentinel, along with other newspapers, simply cost too much. A daily paper in New York City in 1830 cost six cents, not that you could buy just one; newspaper proprietors preferred their customers to pay for a yearly subscription at about ten dollars a year. That was a week’s wages for a skilled journeyman like Day, and an astronomical sum for working-class New Yorkers at a time when a domestic servant made just five dollars a month.
Despite its pro-labor perspective, the Daily Sentinel managed to squeeze down its costs only so far as to charge eight dollars a year for a subscription. In 1832, after just a few months at this doomed enterprise, Day left to work at another six-cent daily, The New York Journal of Commerce. And that’s where he met another journeyman compositor by the name of Dave Ramsay. Together, the two would change the newspaper business forever.
Ramsay had heard about a newspaper in London that sold for just a penny—and he wanted to start such a penny paper in New York. The Sun, as he planned to call it, would be well within the daily budget of most working people. After all, what was a penny? It was the price of an apple, a candle, a shoelace. Ramsay would talk compulsively about the idea, and Day was soon as obsessed as he was. Once, he ran off a dummy headline for their imaginary paper and showed it to a printer friend named Abell. He, however, was less enthusiastic. ‘Abell made no end of fun of [the idea],’ Day recalled fifty years later. ‘Every time we met, he would say, “Well, Day, how is that penny Sun? Ha, ha! Ho, ho!”’
Within four months, The Sun’s circulation was 5,000; within a year, 10,000. In two years, 19,000 copies of The Sun were sold every day, making it the best-selling newspaper in the world. And flush with this success, in 1835, The Sun became the first daily newspaper to be printed on a steam-powered press in the United States. Day’s penny paper was soon imitated, including by Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune and James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald. In 1830, just one in every sixteen New Yorkers had bought a daily paper. By 1850, it was one in every four.
Day was proud of his achievement. ‘Since the Sun began to shine upon the citizens of New York,” he wrote about a year before selling the paper, in 1838, “there has been a great and decided change in the condition of the laboring classes and the mechanics. Now every individual, from the rich aristocrat who lolls in his carriage to the humble laborer who wields a broom in the streets, read the Sun…. Already can we perceive a change in the mass of the people. They think, talk and act in concert. They understand their own interest, and feel that they have numbers and strength to pursue it with success.’
More than promoting any particular ideology, the penny press made visible New Yorkers who weren’t people of means. Rather than shaping a particular constituency or politics, it brought to life and solidified the idea of constituency, of a civil society, the idea of the public as such. And in granting poor and laboring Americans the dignity of being seen as customers, Day inadvertently also helped to force the upper classes to contend with the masses as a class. This was the purpose of the popular press, the very calling of journalism, as the high-school dropout and journeyman printer saw it. And for generations that followed Benjamin Day, news reporting remained a decidedly blue-collar trade.
In other news: A brief history of PEZ: “Part character, part candy, and all collectible, the trinket has delighted kids and collectors around the world for decades. And yet when Austrian confectioner Eduard Haas III invented PEZ, he set out to corner an entirely different market . . . An anti-smoking advocate, Haas III wanted to create a tablet that would ‘not only refresh one’s breath but could also help consumers who were anxious to cut down on smoking or overeating,’ writes Shawn Peterson, company historian at PEZ Candy, Inc. . . . Before he could sell the new product, Haas needed a name—something snappy and universal. He took the first, middle and last letters from the German word for peppermint, pfefferminz, and created PEZ.”
England’s Caravaggio: “Matthew Craske’s book challenges the prevailing idea of Joseph Wright as product and servant of rationalism and Enlightenment.”
A Roman mosaic discovered in 2017 has now been dated to the the fifth century: “According to Martin Papworth, National Trust archaeologist, the date of the mosaic is significant, given the prevailing belief that towns and villas in the region were in state of decline triggered by the end of Roman rule in Britain by the end of the 4th century. The dawn of the 5th century marked the beginning of the Dark Ages, a period characterized by prolonged cultural and economic deterioration in Western Europe. Few documents survived the era and archaeological evidence remains scarce.”
Gerald Howard writes about the trade paperback “wars” of the 1980s: “Vintage outdid Penguin in two respects: the overall grid and unified design and illustration of the covers became instant classics, to this day recognizable signifiers of 80s culture. And on their first list they published Jay McInerny’s Bright Lights, Big City as a paperback original and it became an immediate sensation and probably, along with Bonfire of the Vanities, one of the two signature novels of the decade. Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy (with a reissue of his violent epic Blood Meridian), Frederick Exley, Peter Matthiessen, Susanna Kaysen, Denis Johnson, and Joy Williams also had books on the first lists of titles. In short order Gary Fisketjon followed up his trade paperback original success with two more high-impact literary publications in Vintage Contemporaries, Richard Russo’s Mohawk and Richard Ford’s The Sportwriter. Suddenly trade paper originals were hip and happening and the place to be. We were of course stung over at Penguin and feeling competitive. We responded with our own first high-profile original in the CAF series, a very young David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System, which launched the career of perhaps the most extravagantly admired American writer of the past thirty years. And our reprint of Bret Ellis’s bestselling and unnerving debut novel Less Than Zero gave Penguin some needed downtown/nightcrawler cred, as did Catherine Texier’s Lower East Side-based Love Me Tender (well, not so much…), also a trade paper original, with a suitably dissolute Nan Goldin photograph on the cover. There was a lot of fun to be had in publishing in those years by being ‘Contemporary.’”
God Shammgod writes about basketball in Harlem in the 1990s and teaching Kobe Bryant to dribble: “Harlem was different. Harlem was showtime. Brooklyn was all about fighting. I was trying to be Macho Man Randy Savage off the top rope. I didn’t know anything about basketball. So I get to Harlem and I’m like a fish out of water. I’m spazzing out, trying to scrap with dudes, because that’s what we’d do for fun in Brooklyn. And all these Harlem kids are looking at me crazy like, ‘Yo! Chill! You gonna mess up my Kangol bucket hat!’ I remember sitting up in this tree overlooking the court at Rucker Park, watching these guys play for hours, and I was mesmerized. I didn’t know anything about no Magic Johnson, no Larry Bird. I was trying to be a hood legend. In Harlem, you were raised on street basketball. Madison Square Garden? Same city, different planet.”
Max Carter reviews Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy: “Wolfram Eilenberger’s group biography exploring 1920s metaphysics, Time of the Magicians, was, I am relieved to say, written for the pleasure rather than the punishment of its reader. (His epigraph is from Goethe: ‘The best that we have from history is the enthusiasm it stimulates.’) The heroes are (fabulously eccentric) human beings, and their ideas are born of human experience. “
