Page:History of American Journalism.djvu/351

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cooperation grew the present plan of getting out newspapers with the help of patent "insides," or "out sides," as the case may be. In this way the cost of production for country weeklies was greatly reduced. Often the half -printed sheets were sold for the cost of white paper. The profit of the producing company was made from general advertising.

IMPROVEMENTS IN STEREOTYPING

Though The London Times in 1856 had adopted a modern papier-mache process of stereotyping, it used the process, not for pages, but only for columns, which were fastened on the type- revolving cylinder of Hoe's press by means of V-shaped rules. In the same year a proposition was made to The New York Tribune by English stereotypers to establish a plant in New York and to stereotype The New York Tribune at so much per column. Nothing, however, came from these negotiations. Newspapers in New York and in other large cities continued to buy new outfits of type practically every three months.

When the War of the States broke out, circulation had in- creased so rapidly that it was impossible for either The New York Tribune or The New York Herald to meet the demand for papers and Richard Hoe was negotiating with Greeley and Bennett for the construction of twenty-cylinder type-revolving presses to meet the situation. Meanwhile, Charles Craske, a stereotyper by the clay process, had been experimenting with the papier- mache process in an attempt to apply it to newspaper pages. His experiments were carried on in rooms provided by The New York Tribune, which had reached the point where it must have the faster presses already mentioned or set its pages in duplicate, as had been the practice of The London Times before it adopted the papier-mache process. His idea was to cast the whole page after the manner now employed, but in his experiments, covering over two years, he failed to make satisfactory progress because he attempted to cast the plates type-high. It was only when he reached the conclusion to cast a thin plate and then to compel press-builders to change the cylinder that he succeeded in over- coming his difficulty. In August, 1861, The Tribune commenced to print from curved stereotyped plates of whole pages.