The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York by Matthew Goodman Read Free Book Online

hands and then, if necessary, simply rolled up and carried in a pocket, to be finished later.
    For a man with so little direct experience in selling, Benjamin Day had an unusually keen sense of the marketplace. By this point he had worked as a compositor for several of the six-penny papers, the Evening Post, the Journal of Commerce, the Courier and Enquirer, the Mercantile Advertiser, and like the rest of the men in the composing room he had felt the little chill that passed through when the editor entered in his finery, issuing orders. He recognized how great the distance really was between the Fifth Ward and the newspaper district, because he walked it each day. The city’s editors knew little about most New Yorkers, and likely never even conceived of them as readers, but Day, who lived among them, knew that as a group they were strikingly literate. They had Bibles and devotional tracts for their religious needs; they had, for diversion, adventure stories and gallows confessions and broadsheet ballads. The more politically minded among them had broadsides and pamphlets. They had all kinds of printed matter. What they didn’t have, yet, was a daily newspaper.
    On that September day in 1833, any potential reader could see in an instant that Benjamin Day’s new paper was dramatically different from the others being published around town. For one thing, its pages measured only eight by eleven inches, or about the size of a sheet of letter paper.
    And there on the front page—just below the Sun nameplate emblazoned with the American eagle holding shield and arrows—was that captivating phrase: PRICE ONE PENNY.
    Inside, Day had made page two the news page, following newspaper tradition, though owing to its unusually small size, the page was printed in three columns rather than the six or even seven found in the blanket sheets. Most of the second column was taken up by reports from the police office, with Day’s brief but colorful descriptions of recently heard cases, which included an assault (“John Evans, brought up for exercising – 28 – 0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 29
    Benjamin Day’s Whistling Boy
    the muscles of his right arm by pounding John Nixon on the head with his fist”); an attempt to pass counterfeit money to a boy selling oysters; a man who turned over a table of pies, peaches, and pickled lobsters near Fulton Market; and a woman arrested for attacking her husband, even though the man, having succeeded in calming “his tyrannical rib” (as Day described the wife), had decided to drop the charges. One of the lengthier reports even included a bit of dialect: Wm. Scott, from Centre Market, brought up for assaulting Charlotte Gray, a young woman with whom he lived. The magistrate, learning that they never were married, offered the prisoner a discharge, on condition that he would marry the injured girl, who was very willing to withdraw the complaint on such terms. Mr. Scott cast a sheep’s eye towards the girl, and then looking out of the window, gave the bridewell a melancholy survey: he then gave the girl another look, and was hesitating as to which he should choose—a wife or a prison. The Justice insisted on an immediate answer. At length he concluded that he “might as well marry the critter,” and they left the office apparently satisfied.
    Day also included on the page short items more typical of the six-penny papers, such as news of the arrival in the city of the celebrated balloonist Charles Durant, a dinner given for the postmaster general in Nashville, and the continuing expansion of New York’s economy. He devoted more space to a Dickensian account of an orphan boy from a local almshouse who had been taken in by a family on Pearl Street. On the first day in his new home, the boy told his foster mother about the only friend he had ever had, “old dusty Bob, the rag-man, died last week”—Bob, as it turns out, had once given the boy a piece of gingerbread. Considerable