The Way the World Works: Essays (17 page)

The Sunday
World
was the real prodigy of physical dissemination: it sometimes sold half a million or more copies, and it went all over the country. In 1908 Adolph Ochs, publisher of the smaller, soberer
New York Times,
wrote admiringly of the
World
’s “phenomenal and prodigious success”; another newspaperman, Frank Munsey, said of Pulitzer: “He came here as a whirlwind out of the West, and overturned and routed the conservativism then in vogue as a cyclone sweeps all before it.”

The peculiar thing, however, is that out of all this cyclonic activity, next to nothing survives. Libraries, suspicious of low and pandering art, collected and bound for safekeeping only a few complete original runs of mass-circulation newspapers such as the
World
—they preferred the
New York Times
and the
Evening Post,
papers that carried “real” news with less splash and dash. And then, in the ’50s, intrigued by new techniques of photographic miniaturization, libraries began to replace the few runs of popular papers that they did possess with monochromatic copies made on inch-and-a-half-wide strips of clear plastic: microfilm. (You can see reproductions from a microfilm copy of the
Evening World
used as wallpaper in many Subway sandwich shops.) Almost every American library that could afford to swapped a new plastic copy for the heavy, space-consuming wood-pulp original—even two of the greatest, the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library. They threw out the bound volumes or, later, sold them to scrap dealers who razored out
cartoons, automobile ads, and historical dates, and used the rest as quarry for the “original Newspaper of the Day You Were Born.”

So the reproductions that you see in this book—the art by Bush, J. Campbell Cory, Richard Felton Outcault, Charles Saalburg, George McManus, Marius de Zayas, Dan Smith, and Louis Biedermann; the writing by Mark Twain, Robert Peary, and others—come from what is one of the very last, perhaps the last, set of original copies of the turn-of-the-century New York
World
in existence—certainly the last in such pristine condition. The set came from England: lucky for us, the British Library, in 1898, as the Spanish-American War loomed, felt that Pulitzer’s
World
was an essential source of opinion and reportage, and librarians there began subscribing to the
World
and (just as important) began binding it into durable, red-spined, gold-lettered volumes. For decades, foresightedly, through various financial upheavals and geopolitical reshufflements, they kept these volumes safe on shelves. Then, in 1999, feeling the pinch after opening an expensive new building, the library’s managers made quiet plans to offer much of its foreign (i.e., North and South American and Continental European) newspaper collection to other libraries, and to auction off the unwanted residue to dealers. I was in the midst of writing a book about the particulars of the losses attributable to microfilm—the crudity of the microcopying itself, the perishability of early acetate film, the bogus science predicting acidic paper’s imminent doom—when I learned of the British Library’s disposal plans. So I went to England and asked them to keep the American papers. I said that they were rich and rare—which they certainly are—and that I knew that they held, for example, true “first editions” of the writings of Stephen
Crane, O. Henry, Robert Benchley, John Steinbeck, H. G. Wells, Thomas Edison, William Faulkner, and hundreds of other writers, some named, some anonymous. I said that their foreign newspaper collection was just as valuable as, and considerably rarer than, just about any acknowledged rarity in their possession—rarer, for example, than the justly treasured output of Renaissance printers such as Aldus, Plantin, and Wynkyn de Worde. A century ago, newspapers like the
World,
the
Chicago Tribune,
the
New-York Tribune,
and many others were everywhere and were read by everyone; now they are almost nowhere: their historico-artifactual resplendence and indispensability was, it seemed to me, beyond dispute. Not only that—so I argued—but if we ever wanted to make better reproductions of the newspapers than microfilming offered—if we wanted to make digital or even old-fashioned analog reproductions in color, for instance—we would need the original pages to work from: you can’t make a sharp, continuous-tone color photograph out of a fuzzy, high-contrast black-and-white microcopy. So I said to the librarians in England.

But my anti-sales pitch wasn’t successful—the British librarians had gotten some interesting faxed-in bids from a Pennsylvanian dealer by the time I visited, and, it seemed, they simply wanted his money. And I knew what that meant. It meant box-cutter butchery and plastic-sheathed, issue-by-issue dispersal, and I concluded that the only way to save the collection was to raise the money to buy it and ship it to leased quarters in the United States. So my wife and I—my wife being Margaret Brentano, the editor and caption writer of this book—formed a nonprofit organization, grandiosely named the American Newspaper Repository, though it was really just the two of us overseen by some kindly advisers,
and we bought more than six thousand volumes of American newspapers (a volume being anywhere from two weeks’ to three months’ worth of daily issues), plus another thousand wrapped bundles, most in extraordinarily good condition, all formerly owned by the British government. The cost, including two long runs that we ended up buying from a dealer who had outbid us, was approximately $150,000; the collection arrived in several shipments in 2000.

And that’s how we came to be standing at tables in a large chilly brick mill building in Rollinsford, New Hampshire, paging with wonderment through Pulitzer’s almost-lost
World
. The mill space we had rented, for two thousand dollars a month, was the size of two, maybe three, tennis courts, with rows of battered, factory-blue metal columns running down it and an inflatable black bat strung near a fire door at the far end. In Pulitzer’s day, and well before, the building had held enormous, noisy, oil-dripping looms (which looked somewhat like newspaper printing presses), but when we got there the place had become extremely quiet. Over near the loading dock, the Humpty Dumpty Potato Chip Company stored boxes of barbecue-flavored snacks in metal cages; above us was the ever-shrinking presence of Damart, the French maker of silk underwear, latterly brought low by Asian competition. One of the mill’s upper floors was jammed with cast-off hospital equipment—evil-looking gurneys and examination tables, failed heart monitors, vintage monster-movie X-ray machines—all trucked there by a man of mystery and energy who purportedly assembled medical clinics in third-world countries.

A former Damart employee volunteered to build a wall for us and install lights: suddenly we found that we had a huge still expanse with a sign on the door that said
AMERICAN
NEWSPAPER REPOSITORY
. I put up a few dozen extra-long window shades, because newsprint is better off in the dark, but the late-afternoon sun slipped in along the edges of the window frames and striped the floor with long, dusty blades that crumpled over the backs of volunteers—students, teachers, librarians, my own children—as they unloaded pallet after pallet of newspaper volumes and sorted them into yearly piles by title and date. (The British Library had shipped them to us in semi-random order.) We bought ten-foot-high industrial shelving till we ran out of money. Our shelved run of the
New York Times
was impressive; like a steam locomotive and its tender, it ran down much of the length of the room. Occasionally, students of history or journalism would come and browse through issues, taking notes, sitting on old hospital chairs, or some scholar would visit in search of a specific article or image or theme.

And the
World
? We loved its heavy, vellum-cornered volumes, which smelled faintly of acid paper: 1898 began on the upper left of the shelving, at the very top; one range over, there were the fat monthly tomes from 1903 and 1906 (for some reason I became particularly fond of the year 1906), and then the teens, and then on the other side of the shelves (near windows that, if you peeked under the shades, looked down on the Salmon Falls River), the run ran on through the
World
’s more sophisticated, literary period, when it invented the crossword puzzle, published Dorothy Parker and A. J. Liebling, and exposed the misdeeds of the Ku Klux Klan. Over several months, Margaret went through every
World
volume from 1898 to 1911, the year of Pulitzer’s death. “Take a look at this airship!” she called. “You’ve got to see this Biedermann!” She found scenic wonders and oddities everywhere, marking them with strips of paper, but
especially in the Sunday issues, where the
World
’s editors and illustrators and writers were obviously having a fantastic time—cackling to themselves, we imagined, as every week they published another vaudeville revue of urban urges and preoccupations. The world should know about the
World,
we felt. Why should an artist such as Dan McCarthy, who gave us “The American Sky-Scraper Is a Modern Tower of Babel,” be totally forgotten? You can go to a museum to see the paintings of Ashcan School artist George Luks, but his disturbing newspaper drawings of 1898, “The Persecution Mania” and “All Is Lost Save Honor,” exist only on microfilm, as far as I can tell, apart from these pages. The
World
’s innovations in page design, in color “electrogravure” printing, in puzzles and children’s illustration, in teasingly elaborate charts, and in swervy, swoopy typography are everywhere evident to a modern eye; perhaps it’s time to take a preliminary step toward restoring the Sunday paper to its rightful place in the history of American vernacular art.

In the fall of 2003 David Ferriero, then librarian at Duke University, offered to take the entire collection to Duke, where it now safely resides under the care of the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library. But before we packed it back up onto pallets and loaded it onto trucks (five tractor-trailer loads, as it turned out, a hefty gift), we wanted, like proud parents who send their grown child off to college, to take some pictures—not just digital snapshots, either, but real pictures. I first rented, then bought, a view camera and a lens, and I rigged a five-foot-high copy stand out of an old tripod and some cast-iron pipe, and Margaret and I began photographing the pages from the
World
that you see here. We have left the papers exactly as they were originally arranged, that is, in strict chronological order, because one
of the delights of the
World,
as of all newspapers, is that it is as utterly miscellaneous as it is date-bound. We have not cut anything out, needless to say—the pages emerge from their respective volumes just where they were sewn by the British Library (then called the British Museum) a century ago. It’s time to call an end to the razoring-out of beautiful things for the sake of copying them.

Joseph Pulitzer was all but blind when the art in these pages was first published: the more his own sight dimmed, the more imploringly colorful his paper became. He was too high-strung to appear in public—he was never seen at the
World
’s ornate offices, overlooking City Hall—and he lived mostly on his yacht, where he could get around by feel, traveling from port to port and managing the newspaper via a team of readers and abstractors and long-suffering plenipotentiaries. Through them he kept a close hand on his beloved creation, giving it, he said, every moment of his waking time. In 1898, when the reproductions in this book commence, Pulitzer had just bought a new high-speed color printing press from Richard Hoe & Company. The new press was “all important,” Pulitzer wrote; he ordered his editors to “impress this novelty on the public mind as the greatest progress in Sunday journalism.” Which they did. “Like rainbow tints in the spray are the hues that splash and pour from its lightning cylinders,” said one ad announcing the coming of the new press. It was, said another, “
THE MOST MARVELOUS MECHANISM OF THE AG
E
”
—and in some ways it was, for it allowed each citizen, rich or poor, to gain entrance, every Sunday, into a private museum.

So the pictures in this book begin in 1898, with the Spanish-American War. And they close in 1911, the year that Pulitzer died. The Sunday
World
always wanted to surprise:
it exaggerated and sought the bizarre angle and turned small news into big news—but its exaggerations now have truths of their own to tell us. We hope you will find, as we did, that looking at these time-tanned pages gives a sense of the exuberance and modernness and strangeness of the turn-of-the-century city that no history book can easily supply.

(2005)

O
n April 9, 1842, the
Whip,
a weekly New York newspaper that pledged to “keep a watchful eye on all brothels and their frail inmates,” carried an article about chambermaids. Chambermaids were women of flesh and blood, according to the article, “with the same instinctive desires as their masters, and much of their time is necessarily passed alone, in remote apartments, which usually contain beds.” Accompanying the article was a drawing: a chambermaid gripped the long wooden handle of a warming pan that projected rudely from between a tailcoated gentleman’s legs.

The
Whip
was, along with three other newspapers—the
Flash,
the
Rake,
and the
Libertine
—part of what is now called the “flash press”: a short-lived public outburst of suggestive talk, threatened blackmail, bare-knuckle boxing, and ornate vituperation that swept through New York in the early 1840s. For nearly 150 years, the flash press was all but forgotten
by historians—before it was rediscovered by Patricia Cline Cohen, of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

In the late 1980s, Cohen was at the American Antiquarian Society, in Worcester, Massachusetts, researching a book about the sensational murder of Helen Jewett, a nineteenth-century courtesan. The antiquarian society had, as it happened, just bought a large private collection of flash papers from the son of a sportswriter and boxing promoter. Cohen, fascinated, began paging through the issues, taking notes. She told another scholar, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, now of Loyola University in Chicago, about what she’d found, and Gilfoyle cited the papers in
City of Eros,
his 1992 history of New York prostitution. Soon word got out in academia, and now, as the historiography of paid sex has come into vogue, the flash collection is one of the more heavily used holdings in the society’s priceless antebellum hoard.