That was rapid work for 1862, but the stereotypers of the present day will take a form from the composing-room, make the papier-mâché impression, pour in the molten metal, and have the curved plate ready for the press in twelve minutes.
The new process saved Beach a lot of money as well as much precious time. Before its coming, when the paper was printed directly from the face of the type, the Sun had to buy a full new set of type six or eight times a year, at an annual cost of six thousand dollars.
The war played havoc with newspaper finances. The price of news-print paper rose to twenty-four cents a pound. All the morning papers except the Sun raised their prices to three or four cents in 1862. The Sun stayed at its old penny.
On January 1, 1863, in order to meet advancing costs and still sell the Sun for one cent, Beach found it necessary to “remove one column from each side of the page”—a more or less ingenuous way of saying that the Sun was reduced from seven columns to five. The columns were shortened, too, and the whole paper was set in agate type. The Sun then looked much as it had appeared twenty years before.
With these economies Beach was able to keep the price at one cent until August 1, 1864, when the Sun slyly said:
We shall require the one cent for the Sun to be paid in gold, or we will receive as an equivalent two cents in currency.
Apologies or explanations are needless. An inflated currency has raised the price of white paper nearly threefold.
Of course nobody had one cent in gold, so the Sun readers grinned and paid two cents in copper.
From that day on the price of the Sun was two cents until July 1, 1916, when Frank A. Munsey bought the Sun, combined his one-cent newspaper, the New York Press, with it, and reduced the price to one cent. On January 26, 1918, by reason of heavy expenses incidental to the war, the Sun, with all the other large papers of New York, increased its price to two cents a copy. In its eighty-five years the Sun has been a penny paper thirty-two years, a two-cent paper fifty-three years.
The Sun was constantly profitable in the decade before the Civil War. The average annual profits from 1850 to 1860 were $22,770. The high-water mark in that period was reached in 1853, when the advertising receipts were $89,964 and the net profits $42,906. Its circulation in September, 1860, was fifty-nine thousand copies daily, of which forty-five thousand were sold on the island of Manhattan.