The World—the self-described “greatest newspaper on earth”—was actually three newspapers, the morning World (published Monday through Saturday, often with a political cartoon by Walt McDougall or C. G. Bush on the front page), the Evening World (carrying boxing news and sports scores, with a more raffish flavor throughout), and “THE GREAT SUNDAY WORLD,” which weighed as much as a small roast beef. Together these three Worlds were, in their days of triumph, seen simultaneously by more people than any other publication, with the possible exception of the Bible. Mornings and evenings, hundreds of thousands of fresh World issues groaned out from the basement levels of Pulitzer’s imposingly gold-domed skyscraper onto every New York street corner and trolley stop; in 1899, despite some competition from interloper William Randolph Hearst, the World claimed on its front page, believably, that it had achieved the “largest circulation ever reached in one year by any newspaper.”
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.