“THE SUN” A SEPTUAGENARIAN
On September 3 the New York Sun celebrated its seventieth anniversary, remarks the Christian Advocate. There were seven daily morning papers in existence when it began. The Journal of Commerce is the only one which survives. The Sun has had a diversified political career, but at all times for more than fifty years has been edited with unsurpassed ability, variety, and pungency. It was founded by a job printer from Springfield, Mass., named Benjamin H. Day. With his own hand he worked off several hundred impressions of the seven-by-ten-inch newspaper. The day that paper was founded there were only one-hundred and eighty-three miles of railroad in operation in the whole United States; one clerk in the New York post-office distributed the Northern mail and the Eastern mail as fast as they came in, and also “the great Northern mail.” The price of the Sun was one penny. The other seven newspapers were sold at six cents a copy. Their entire edition amounted to about eighteen thousand papers a day. The advertisements in the first copy were all bogus; that is to say, Day copied them from other newspapers, to impart a business-like look to his own little sheet. When he started the paper it was only to advertise his job office and recover some of the prosperity that he had lost in the hard times of the cholera year. The Sun is seven years younger than the Christian Advocate, which celebrated its seventieth anniversary on Sept. 26, 1896.