Page:History of American Journalism.djvu/125



PHINTING-PRESSES OF PERIOD

Newspapers continued to be printed on the ordinary flat-bed hand-press. The size of the editions of some papers had become so large that the man who pulled the levers complained of back- aches. To overcome this difficulty, inventors had already started to find some way out of the difficulty. Before the close of the period, Benjamin Dearborn, publisher of The New Hamp- shire Gazette, had invented a wheel press which would print the whole side of a sheet at one pull of the lever. No great mechani- cal improvement in the printing-press was made, however, until the beginning of the next century when a revolving cylinder was substituted for the lever.

SMALL CIRCULATION

The circulation of individual papers during the Revolutionary Period still remained small. James Rivington, with Number 78 of The New-York Gazetteer; or the Connecticut, New Jersey, Hud- son's River and Quebec Weekly Advertiser, boasted in October, 1774, that he sent his paper to every colony of North America, and announced with pride that it had a circulation of thirty-six hundred. As Rivington's paper later came to be known as The Lying Gazette, it is barely possible that he was also a "circula- tion liar." His paper did have, however, one of the widest dis- tributions of any of the period.

POST VS. PRESS

John Holt, in his New York Journal for October 30, 1766, com- plained most bitterly that his rival, James Parker, prevented the post-riders of New Jersey from distributing his paper to customers and had substituted in its place the newspaper pub- lished by Parker, "as his Paper is printed in the same Form, and under the same Title that mine used to be, it is probable many of my Customers may not have attended to the Difference of the Printer's Name. The Meanness and Dishonesty of this Proceeding, I shall leave to the Resentment of my Custom- ers, who will determine, whether to encourage such a Man, by accepting his Papers, or whether to adhere to the Printer,