Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 9.djvu/428

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [11 s. ix. MAY 30,

of representatives of papers of all shades of politics, and in doing so said that,

" in all the things with which I have been asso- ciated since I entered the profession, I never saw anything in which there was such real enthusiasm and delight as this presentation caused. I am more than proud to have been chosen by the profession to present the book it represents."

The publication by The Times of statistics of its sale is contrary to the traditions of the old-established press. Before the News- paper Stamp was abolished, the only means of arriving at the circulation of a paper was by reading the stamp returns issued from the Stamp Office, and this list was published in some of the papers. But those figures did not represent the actual sales, as the stamps on unsold copies were allowed for at Somerset House, the stamps being torn off from the copies for that purpose. These lists of stamps issued did not indicate the sale of a few privileged papers such as The Athenceum, The Builder, and Punch, which, not being strictly papers containing news, were allowed to publish both stamped and unstamped issues, the sale of the unstamped copies being by far the larger, as the ugly red stamp was a great disfigurement when copies were bound. There was so much difficulty in deciding what was actually news that Milner Gibson in 1851 obtained the appointment of a Select Committee to inquire into the working of the Newspaper Stamp Act, Mowbray Morris, the manager of The Times, being one of the most important witnesses ; but Parliament was slow in moving in those days, and it was not until the 15th of June, 1855, that the Newspaper Stamp Bill became law. It must be remem- bered that there was one gain attached to the purchase of a paper with the impressed stamp : it could be posted and reposted.

By the kind permission of the proprietors of The Times, I am enabled to place on record in ' N. & Q.' the official statement in that- paper on Friday, the 8th inst., which gave statistics of its sales during the past fifty years. The article says :

" It will be seen that the lowest period of the journal's fortunes was 1903, when the circulation was 35,000, and the highest 1866, the year of the Austrian campaign. The circulation to-day is practically five times larger than eleven years ago.

Average Daily Circulation. 1864 65,908

1865 1866 1867 1868 1869 1870 1871

64,850 70,673 61,571 61,173 58,971 62,013 63,122

1872 1873 1874 1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 1880 1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890 1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913

May 1 2 4 5 6 .7

TO-DAY.

Average Daily Circulation 61,269 61,648 62,615 63,558 62,975 61,713 60,660 57,991 56,542 54,935 52,380 46,37$ 48,345 46,581 46,693 45,230 44,236 41,958 40,568 41,214 40,455 40,004 37,868 37,359^ 37,716 36,751 36,316 37,086 38,176 37,780 36,702 35,605 39,552 43,474 47,845 44,947 42,495 43,752 44,841 45,80ff 46,714 53,13a

170,100 169,925 172,350 171,650 170,550 170,825

" Not since the autumn of 1814 has The

Times passed through such an eventful period a* the present.

" It was in that year that the first newspaper ever printed by steam was issued from Printing House Square. The result gave The Times an immense and immediate advantage over its many competitors.

" Then, as now, the paper was confronted by a paper famine caused by the huge demand of its readers.

" It has been an open secret in the world of politics and publishing that since March 16 Printing House Square has been engaged in a desperate struggle to obtain a sufficient quantity of paper of the famous hard white quality associ- ated with The Times. The most careful estimate of the probable growth of The Times by the reduction in price was that the gross circulation of the journal would reach 80,000 copies, and i