Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [543]
Book selling flourished too. Stores along Broadway between Pine and Houston concentrated on new titles. Secondhand volumes were found at shops on Nassau Street and Pearl or farther uptown along Canal, Mulberry, and the Bowery. When the Astor Library opened, Fourth Avenue between Astor Place and 14th Street became the city’s used-book center; and it remained so for a century. In addition streetcorner bookstalls served as outlets, especially for the fledgling pornography trade: in 1843 one paper claimed that nearly every stand sold “libidinous books with the most revolting and disgusting contents.”
“THE CENTRE OF LITERARY POWER”
The efflorescence of book publishing boosted magazine production as well. Political, literary, domestic, and religious journals had long flourished in New York. Now commercial periodicals began to circulate at a hitherto unmatched pace. As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow noted as early as 1839, in “the Great Metropolis. . . new literary projects in the shape of Magazines and Weekly papers are constantly started, showing great activity, and zeal, and enterprise.”
Two of the grandest were offshoots of great publishing houses. In June 1850 Fletcher Harper set up Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, in handsome format, with sumptuous engravings. The raw material was filched from the best English authors, supplemented occasionally by local talent. The magazine also featured columns of light commentary—including “The Editor’s Easy Chair,” a seat filled in the late 1850s by George William Curtis—and offered travel sketches by genteel tourists just back from perambulating Italian art galleries and classical ruins. The formula worked to perfection in a culture that still set its course by European stars. Harpers printed seventy-five hundred of the first number; in six months circulation hit fifty thousand; by 1860 it reached two hundred thousand.
With figures like these it wasn’t hard for Charles F. Briggs, the New York editor (and author of Harry Franco), to convince Harpers’ rival George Palmer Putnam to found another monthly. Putnam’s Magazine, with Briggs at the helm, sought out American authors, compensated them well, and attracted sophisticated contributions on art, literature, and society.
Robert Bonner’s unaffiliated New York Ledger outpaced both Harper’s and Put-nam ‘s. An Irish immigrant printer turned entrepreneur, Bonner purchased the Ledger in 1851 when it hung on the brink of collapse. Over the next several years he aggressively improved its circulation by lowering the price to three cents a copy and offering a class and gender-straddling mix of adventure stories, domestic romances, and first-rank writing.
Bonner, an advertising genius, spent twenty-five thousand dollars a week on promotions. A pioneer in the use of “white space,” he took out full pages in the Herald, Tri-bune, and Times, only to leave the entire space blank but for a single line in the center or a corner: “Read Mrs. South worth’s new story in The Ledger.” In this manner, Bonner promoted a star system that featured the writer as much as the written word. He paid unprecedented sums—thirty thousand dollars for a novel by Henry Ward Beecher, three thousand for a poem by Longfellow—then advertised his expenses. In 1855 Bonner signed Fanny Fern to write for the Ledger. Born Sara Payson Willis, Fern had won national acclaim in Boston for a volume of essays, Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio (1853), that sold over a hundred thousand copies. Now she moved to New York, where Bonner paid her one hundred dollars a column,