Enter our antagonist: mass publishing

Having brought our Puritan hero Tony Comstock into contact with New York pornography, we take a section break and return with:

The story of mass culture in the 19^th Century is largely the story of paper. In fact, it was paper that made possible a “mass culture.” Over the span of four or five decades, a tidal wave of cheap paper and printer’s ink surged across the cultural, social, and economic landscapes of Europe and North America. Industries were born, old trades were wiped out, hierarchies were toppled and the obscure were vaulted into power. Paper transformed the ways in which information was transmitted, children were taught, class identities were shaped, politics was conducted, morals and aspirations were shaped, literature and art were developed, and the whole shape of culture was formed. New York was one the cities most changed by paper, and in the years after the Civil War it became the center of the one first great cultural battles over paper’s new power.

            As the century began, little had changed in publishing, printing, or paper manufacturing since the Gutenberg revolution had settled down in the early 17^th Century. Paper, hand-pressed from linen and other rags, was expensive as a raw commodity: middle-class letter writers developed the practice of “cross-writing,” completing a letter and then turning the page at a right angle in order to write perpendicularly on top of the earlier words, thus squeezing two sheets’ worth of words onto one precious slip of paper.

Printing, conducted mainly by independent artisans with small staffs of journeymen, made published material more expensive still. Book prices were such that many writers lined up subscribers in advance to cover the costs. In 1796, the English novelist Fanny Burney filled the first thirty-six pages of her novel Camilla with a list of her subscribers; Camilla was a best-selling novel by the standards of the day, but it was aimed at a select and mostly affluent audience. Some books sold in the tens of thousands, a few may even have mounted toward a hundred thousand, but they were those that became required reading among the intelligentsia: Voltaire’s Candide, Goethe’s Faust, Rousseau’s Julie. A market for popular fiction was building, but its clientele remained well-to-do and even the more successful novels sold only to a few thousand readers. Burney’s Camilla was considered a tremendous success for having sold out its first print run of four thousand copies.

Newspapers were circulated among the affluent and posted in public places for the less affluent. The “broadsheet,” the gigantic page that was becoming standard for news, was as much poster as reading material. Most newspapers, especially in the United States, were partisan political organs, supported by wide-ranging political networks more than by local readers and advertisers. Production and distribution were slow, often creating a lag of a few days between an event and its description in the journals, and most of them ignored the stories of crime and mishap that we think of as “news” today in favor of discourse on political developments. Circulation was primitive: copies were sold at the printing offices, delivered by hand or wagon to scattered general stores, or mailed to subscribers.

All these publications consisted almost entirely of the typeset word. Pictures could only be reproduced by engraving, a slower and far more expensive process even than printing. The less costly and more widely circulated publications generally contained no pictures, and what pictures did reach print were mostly simple line drawings. Art and illustration remained the province of people who could see original pieces—which for most meant only what was displayed in churches and other public buildings—and those who could afford fine engravings. There was no such thing as a mass visual medium or a popular illustrative vocabulary. Fine art, precise representation, and pornography were all the provinces of the few.

By the end of the 18^th Century, however, it had become clear that the markets for all kinds of printed material were growing, and that a vast number of customers were eager to buy whatever they could afford. The populations of Western Europe and America were growing rapidly, and literacy was on the rise thanks to burgeoning industrial economies and a spreading doctrine of the value of education—even for the poor, in the United States and a few other countries. Urban populations were growing especially quickly, creating vast new markets for newspapers. In 1780, a French chemist named Aimé Argand, knowing how much this new urban, literate citizenry must crave more hours to read, developed a clever lamp that burned as much as ten times brighter than a candle. By the end of the century, the darkness of night had been driven back more violently than it had been in millennia, and the time taken from it was used mainly to consume the printed word.

Soon other chemists, mechanics, and printers were devoting themselves to finding ways to lower the costs of producing those words. For generations, most printers had been able to press about one hundred pages in an hour, the fastest printers double that, scarcely enough to keep up with the growing market. An Englishman, Charles Stanhope, worked out a new press in 1800 that more than doubled that, but then a German outdid him: Friedrich Koenig developed a steam-powered press that put out over a thousand pages an hour. The Times of London, its circulation already the highest in the world, inaugurated the Koenig press in 1814; two years later Koenig sold them another press that could print on both sides of a sheet simultaneously, instantly doubling productivity. The Times instantly longer and come pouring out of the presses earlier in the morning, while its price dropped. The newspaper for the masses was born.