Read The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York for Free Online Page A

edge of the working-class Fifth Ward, just a few blocks from the Five Points and all its miseries.
    As the months passed and business didn’t improve, Day increasingly felt the pressure of family responsibilities bearing down on him, as hard and heavy as the platen of his little-used press, imprinting a single word: ruin.
    Some print jobs were still coming in, and he could find occasional extra work as a compositor for some of the newspapers, but he needed something regular, something steady; ideally, it would be something that would also help him publicize the quality of his print business.
    As he stood for hours at the printing press in his tiny ground-floor shop, his mind kept returning to an idea proposed by a friend of his named Dave Ramsay, with whom he had worked as a compositor for the Journal of Commerce. Ramsay’s idea was to publish a new kind of newspaper, meant not for merchants or politicians but for working people like them. All of the papers in town cost six cents, too much for most New Yorkers; this paper, though, would cost only one cent. At the time, Ben Day had laughed down the idea with the other compositors—how can you make any money selling newspapers for a penny?—but now he began to wonder if it could actually work.
    Still, as Day must have been aware, a cheap paper had been tried earlier that year in New York, and the results were hardly encouraging. It had been the notion of a young man named Horatio Sheppard, a student at the nearby Eldridge Street Medical School. Walking to class each morning, Sheppard crossed the raucous Chatham Street marketplace, where the street vendors offered everything for just one cent. He noted to himself how cheerfully people parted with a penny, how little difference there – 25 – 0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 26
    the sun and the moon
    seemed to be between having a penny and having no money at all. Buying something for a penny was, in their minds, almost like getting it for free.
    Though he was studying to be a doctor, Sheppard had long been interested in the print trades, and over time he became convinced that it was possible to profitably sell a newspaper, too, for only a penny. For a year and a half, whenever he had time away from class, he made the rounds of the city’s printing offices, talking up his idea to anyone he could button-hole. But he could not convince a single person of the practicality of his idea, until he met a foreman for one of the merchant papers named Francis Story. Story had been looking for the opportunity to start his own printing business and he agreed to go in on the plan, provided that Dr.
    Sheppard (he had by now received his medical degree) also bring on a printer friend of his, a moon-faced country boy named Horace Greeley.
    Greeley had come to New York from Vermont less than two years earlier, dressed in ill-fitting homespun clothes and, like a character from a Grimm tale, carrying all his belongings in a bandana slung over his shoulder. But he was already an expert printer and had a reputation for remarkable intelligence (it was said that he had read the Bible through by the time he was five years old), and his unprepossessing appearance hid a restless ambition, one that eventually carried him to the editorship of the New York Tribune, where he would become one of the most celebrated of all the city’s editors and in 1872 the presidential candidate of both the Democratic and Liberal Republican parties. Greeley found Sheppard’s idea appealing, but he prided himself on his New England practicality and agreed to serve as the paper’s master printer on the condition that it be sold for two cents rather than one. Sheppard was dumbfounded by Greeley’s demand. The whole appeal of the enterprise lay in its cheapness—the difference between one cent and two, he insisted, was all the difference in the world—but Greeley was not to be dissuaded. Despairing of any alternative to partnership with these men, Sheppard