As newspapers are closing down in 2009, author Matthew Goodman takes a look at the tenuous birth of the newspaper industry almost two hundred years ago.

The Sun and the Moon follows the early life of a penny newspaper in New York City. Editor Benjamin Day published his first issue of The Sun in 1833. His plan was to compete with the six-penny papers by running articles and getting advertisers geared towards the working class. The expensive papers of the day were sold to the well-to-do and were filled with banking and business news. Day’s paper would include items from police blotters and more entertaining content from papers around the world. Among the stories The Sun would report was that of a boy who whistled while he slept and the story of a four foot long snake being extracted from a man’s stomach. With the addition of Richard Adam Locke in 1835, The Sun was catapulted into a popularity never before seen by a newspaper.

Astronomy was the leading science of the people, appealing to scientists and theologians alike. With this realization, Locke published a series of articles based on the research of the most celebrated astronomer of the day. Great Astronomical Discoveries, Lately Made by Sir John Herschel, L.L.D., F.R.S., & c. at the Cape of Good Hope was filled with wondrous details of Herschel’s findings on the moon as seen through a telescope. Plant life, streams, strange animals, buildings and people with wings, man-bats.

As Orson Welles did years later with his radio broadcast of War of the Worlds, Richard Adam Locke found himself the conductor of a train that got a bit off of his intended track. But this train ran for weeks. Long after the series had ended.

In The Sun and the Moon, Matthew Goodman covers a lot of ground. As one can imagine from the subtitle, this book is really about more than this one story. The detail of the newspaper industry in its infancy includes just about everything, right down to the newspaper boys during those harsh times. And one can’t write a book about New York newspapers in the 1830’s without a substantial appearance from Edgar Allan Poe. This same era and location was also the beginnings of, perhaps the greatest hoaxer/showman to ever live, P.T. Barnum. Goodman regales the reader with plenty of information on this character, too, beginning with his first exhibit, 114 year-old Joice Heth, former slave to George Washington.

In covering so much information, I sometimes found myself trying to figure out what, exactly the point of the book was while reading. The Barnum stories, in particular, do not seem necessary to the main story, so they had a tendency to pull me out, as if reading a second book. That could, sometimes, become a bit distracting. Although I found the sections on Barnum very interesting and entertaining, they seemed a bit of a stretch in making the connection back to Locke and The Sun.

However, The Sun and the Moon is definitely a book well worth reading. The slight disjointed effect is brought together by the end of the book. And, Goodman is kind enough to “translate” some of the phrasing from the writings of that time period which can be a bit odd to today’s reader.

• Title: The Sun and the Moon

• Author: Matthew Goodman

• Publisher: Basic Books

• ISBN: 978-0-465-00257-3

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