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 B

saw no choice but to relent.
    Pooling what little capital they had, they took a small office on Liberty Street, at the corner of Nassau. Their selling plan was one that had already met with success in London: boys would hawk the papers on the street. It was decided that the new paper would commence with the new year, and on January 1, 1833, the first issue of the Morning Post hit New York, along with the worst snowstorm in recent memory. The snow whirled across the city, whitening dark cloaks and frock coats, making great drifts on the streets and muffling the cries of the shivering newsboys. All the New – 26 – 0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 27
    Benjamin Day’s Whistling Boy
    Yorkers who could stay at home did, and few of those who ventured outside cared to rummage around in their pockets to find two pennies for a newspaper they didn’t know. Still, despite the terrible conditions the boys managed to sell several hundred copies of the paper each day, and through the first week Sheppard met his expenses, if just barely. By the second week, however, he was deferring payment to his printers, and by the third week Greeley and Story decided to close up shop. By that time Sheppard had prevailed on his partners to lower the price to a penny, and the rise in sales during those last two days convinced him that the paper would have been a success if only he insisted on his original formula: a penny a paper.
    But by that point it was too late. For Horatio Sheppard there was nothing left to do but put up his shingle: he opened a medical office on Eldridge Street and was never heard from again in the newspaper business.
    As a member of New York’s small fraternity of journeymen printers, Day had undoubtedly heard about the failure of Sheppard’s Morning Post, and whenever he broached the subject to his friends they laughed and reminded him of the problems a penny paper would present: how many copies would have to be printed and sold each day, how much advertising would have to be brought in? And what sort of firm, they wanted to know, would advertise in a paper intended for readers who couldn’t afford to buy a real paper? Day understood all this, but he had already proven himself to be good with money (unlike them, he had saved enough to start his own shop), and he thought he had figured out a way around some of the problems.
    Though his stint at the Daily Sentinel had proven a failure, Day prided himself on always learning from experience, and that one had taught him some valuable lessons. The printers who founded the Sentinel had learned their trade on the merchant papers, and for all of their radicalism they were still in thrall to an old way of thinking about a newspaper. Like Horatio Sheppard, Day had come to understand that there was magic in the idea of a newspaper that could be had for only one cent: a “penny paper.”
    For a year’s subscription he would charge not ten or even eight dollars, but only three dollars, well within the range of most potential readers—
    and those subscriptions would be paid in advance, so he wouldn’t have to spend endless hours chasing down subscribers who were behind on their accounts, the way the other newspapers did. In addition to cutting the price of the paper, he would cut the size of its pages as well. The newspaper pages of the time measured about three feet long by two feet wide, or – 27 – 0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 28
    the sun and the moon
    fully four feet across when the paper was opened (because of their size, the papers were known around town as the “blanket sheets”). The format was perfectly convenient for merchant readers, who could spread out the pages on the table of a private library or on the desk of a counting house, but for Day’s readers the pages would have to be much smaller. Not only would smaller pages be less intimidating to an eye not used to reading a newspaper, but a paper of that size could be held comfortably in the