Читать книгу The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918 онлайн

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An advertisement which the Sun saw fit to notice editorially was inserted by a young man in search of a wife—“a young woman who understands the use of the needle, and who is willing to be industrious.” The editorial comment was:

The advertisement was handed to us by a respectable-looking young man, and of course we could not refuse to publish it—though if we were in want of a wife we think we should take a different course to obtain one.

Sometimes the police items, flecked with poetry, and presumably written by Wisner, were tantalizingly reticent, as:

Maria Jones was accused of stealing clothing, and committed. Certain affairs were developed of rather a singular and comical nature in relation to her.

Nothing more than that. Perhaps Wisner rather enjoyed being questioned by admiring friends when he went to dinner at the American House that day.

Bright as the police reporter was, the ship-news man of that day lacked snap. The arrival from Europe of James Fenimore Cooper, who could have told the Sun more foreign news than it had ever printed, was disposed of in twelve words. But it must be remembered that the interview was then unknown. The only way to get anything out of a citizen was to enrage him, whereupon he would write a letter. But the Sun did say, a couple of days later, that Cooper’s newest novel, “The Headsman,” was being sold in London at seven dollars and fifty cents a copy—no doubt in the old-fashioned English form, three volumes at half a guinea each.