The story of the Sun, New York, 1833-1918 / by Frank M. O'Brien.

NEW YORK LIFE IN THE THIRTIES 127
that fountain of the 'needful' from the prolific source
of the Sun's rays by virtue of a total, unconditional,
and unrevisionary sale of the same to its present proprietor."
The name of that "present proprietor" was not
given; but on June 28, 1838, the following notice appeared at the top of the first page:
Communications intended for the Sun must be addressed to Moses Y. Beach, 156 Nassau Street, corner
of Spruce.
Day was really out of the Sun then, after having been
its master for five years lacking sixty-seven days, and
the paper passed into the actual ownership of Beach,
who had married Day's sister, and who had acted as
the bookkeeper of the Sun almost from its inception.
There were those, including Edgar Allan Poe, who believed that Beach was the boss of the Sun even in the
days of the moon hoax, but they were mistaken. The
paper, as the Sun itself remarked on December 4, 1835,
was "altogether ruled by Benjamin H. Day."
"I owned the whole concern," said Mr. Day in 1883,
"till I sold it to Beach. And the silliest thing I ever
did in my life was to sell that paper! "
And why did Day sell, for forty thousand dollars, a
paper which had the largest circulation in the worldabout thirty thousand copies? The answer is that it
was not paying as well as it had paid.
There were a couple of years when his profits had
been as high as twenty thousand dollars. The net return for the six months ending October 1, 1836, as announced by the Sun on April 19, 1837, was $12,981.88;
but at the time when Day sold out, the Sun was about
breaking even. The advertising, due to general dulness
in business-for which the bank failures and the big