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 AGE”—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)
Sex and the City, Circa 1840
A review of The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York, by Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, in association with the American Antiquarian Society (University of Chicago Press, 2008).
On 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.