Nicholson Baker - The Way the World Works

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)

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.

Cohen, Gilfoyle, and a third writer, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz — a historian at Smith College and the author of Rereading Sex, a study of erotica — have together produced The Flash Press, the first book-length survey of this strange rock-pool of 1840s profligacy. Readers of Kurt Andersen’s recent historical novel Heyday —and indeed everyone interested in knowing what New York City was like before the Civil War — will want to have a peek. The authors have managed to unearth and collate a remarkable amount of enriching detail about a curiously fleshy moment in the history of New York publishing.

The primogenitor of the flash press was a brilliant, doomed wretch from Boston named William J. Snelling. Snelling’s mother died when he was six; his father was a war hero and a heavy drinker. After dropping out of West Point, Snelling spent some time living among the Dakota Indians, later writing about them with affection and sympathy in Tales of the Northwest. He returned to Boston, went to prison for public drunkenness, worked up that experience into a book — and then, fired by literary ambition, attempted to create the great American Dunciad: a long poem called Truth, in heroic couplets, attacking many of the minor poets of the day and praising a few. After fifty pages of sharply turned iambic insults, Snelling exhaustedly wrote:

Now have I thump’d each lout I meant to thump,

And my worn pen exhibits but a stump.

After Truth, what? Versifying, Snelling wrote an editor, had gone flat for him. “I can only write in the excitement of strong feeling,” he said. He was living in New York by then, still drinking heavily and spending too much time in the Five Points neighborhood north of City Hall, where members of the frail sisterhood were to be found. Out of this experience he and another editor created Polyanthos, in imitation of scandal sheets from Britain.

And then, in the summer of 1841, came Snelling’s great innovation, the Flash . It was a normal-size weekly newspaper of four pages, set in the usual (i.e., absurdly, illegibly, rag-paper-conservingly tiny) type of the day, with a fancy masthead depicting a dogfight, a leggy ballet dancer, and other racy tropes. (In the back of Cohen, Gilfoyle, and Horowitz’s book, you can see a foldout reproduction in miniature of the front page of one issue.) The paper was edited by Snelling, under the pen name Scorpion, along with two other men, Startle and Sly. Startle was George Wilkes, a snappy dresser and man-about-town who had been arrested for bawdy-house rowdiness in 1836. Sly was George Wooldridge, who ran the Elssler Saloon at 300 Broadway, which sold pickled meats and other delicacies — these could be had in private rooms, “where visitors can sit without observation.” Startle and Sly supplied the gossip and tips on brothel life, and Scorpion worked his caustic belletristic magic to produce a paper that was devoted, as it proclaimed, to “Awful Developments, Dreadful Accidents and Unexpected Exposures.”