The Sun was not as popular in the clubs as it is to-day. A clubman of 1837 caught reading any newspaper except the Courier and Enquirer, the Evening Post, or one of their like, would have been frowned upon by his colleagues.
The Sun found plenty to print.
“We write,” it boasted, “more original editorial matter than any other paper in the city, great or small.”
It poked with its paragraphs at the shinplaster, that small form of currency issued by private bankers. It made fun of phrenology, then one of the fads. It jeered at animal magnetism, another craze. It had the Papineau rebellion, the Patriot War, Indian uprisings, and the belated news from Europe. It printed extracts from the “Pickwick Papers.” Dickens was all the rage.
The Sun’s comment on “Nicholas Nickleby,” when Dickens’s fourth book reached New York in 1838, was that it was as well written as “Oliver Twist,” and “not so gloomy.” Yet the grimness of the earlier novel had a fascination for the youth of that day. It was this book, read by candle-light after the store was closed, that so weakened the eyes of Charles A. Dana—still clerking in Buffalo—that he believed he would have to become a farmer.
The Sun did not mention, in its report of the Patriot War, that Dana was a member of the Home Guard in Buffalo, and had ideas of enlisting as a regular soldier. The Sun did not know of the youth’s existence; nor is it likely that he read Mr. Day’s paper.
A piece of “newspaper news” was printed in the Sun of June 1, 1837—a description of the first so-called endless paper roll in operation. Day still printed on small, flat sheets, but evidently he was impressed with the novelty. The touch about the rag-mill, of course, was fiction:
We have been shown a sheet of paper about a hundred feet in length and two feet wide, printed on both sides by a machine at one operation. This extraordinary invention enables a person to print off any length of paper required for any number of copies of a work or a public journal without a single stop, and without the assistance of any person except one to put in the rags at the extremity of the machine.
This wonderful operation is effected by the placing of the types on stereotype plates on the surface of two cylinders, which are connected with the paper-making machinery. The paper, as it issues from the mill, enters in a properly moistened state between the rollers, which are evenly inked by an ingenious apparatus, and emerges in a printed form. The number of copies can be measured off by the yard or mile. The work which we have seen from this press is “Robinson Crusoe,” and consists of one hundred and sixty duodecimo pages.
The Bible could be printed off and almost disseminated among the Indians in one continuous stream of living truth. The Sun would occupy a roll about seven feet in diameter, and our issue to Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities would be not far from a quarter of a mile long, each. The two cents postage on this would be but a trifle. The whole length of our paper would be about seventy-seven thousand feet, a papyrus which it must be confessed it would take Lord Brougham a longer time to unroll than the vitrified scrolls of Herculaneum and Pompeii.