The story of the Sun, New York: 1833-1928 / by Frank M. O'Brien ; with an introduction by Edward Page Mitchell ...

DAY FINDS A RIVAL IN BENNETT

61

special fire editions went all over the world. At least one
of them ran up against poetic justice. When it reached
Canton, China, six months after the fire, the English
newspaper there classed the story of the conflagration
with Locke's "Astronomical Discoveries," and begged
its readers not to be alarmed by the new hoax.
The Sun had grown more and more prosperous. In
the latter part of 1835 its four pages, each 112 X 18
inches, were so taken up with advertising that it was not
unusual to find reading-matter in only five of the twenty
columns. Some days the publisher would apologize for
leaving out advertisements, on other days, for having so
little room for news. He promised relief, and it came on
January 4, 1836, when the paper was enlarged. It remained a four-page Sun, but the pages were increased
in size to 14 X 20 inches. In announcing the enlargemcnt, the third in a year, the Sun remarked:
We are now enabled to print considerably more
than twenty-two thousand copies, on both sides, in
less than eight hours. No establishment in this
country has such facilities, and no daily newspaper
in the world enjoys so extensive a circulation.
In the first enlarged edition Mr. Day made the boast
that the Sun now had a circulation more than double
that of all the sixpenny respectables combined. He had
a word, too, about the penny papers that had sprung up
in the Sun's wake:
One after another they dropped and fell in quick
succession as they had sprung up; and all, with but
one exception worth regarding, have gone to the
"receptacle of things lost upon earth." Many of