James Parton, The life of Horace Greeley

Except for a few hours on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning, the work of a daily paper never entirely ceases; but, at this hour of the day, between six and seven o'clock, it does nearly cease. The editors are still, it is to be hoped, asleep. The compositors have been in bed for two hours or more. The pressmen of the night are going home, and those of the day have not arrived. The carriers have gone their rounds. The youngest clerks have not yet appeared in the office. All but the slowest of the newsboys have got their supply of papers, and are making the streets and ferries vocal, or vociferous, with their well-known names. There is a general lull; and while that lull continues, we shall lose nothing by going to breakfast.

Part of which is the New York Tribune; and we may linger over it a little longer than usual this morning. It does not look like it, but it is a fact, as any one moderately endowed with arithmetic can easily ascertain, that one number of the Tribune, if it were printed in the form of a book, with liberal type and spacing, would make a duodecimo volume of four hundred pages—a volume, in fact, not much less in magnitude than the one which the reader has, at this moment, the singular happiness of perusing. Each number is the result of, at least, two hundred days work, or the work of two hundred men for one day; and it is sold (to carriers and newsboys) for one cent and a half. Lucifer matches, at forty-four cents for a hundred and forty-four boxes, are supposed, and justly, to be a miracle of cheapness. Pins are cheap, considering; and so are steel pens. But the cheapest thing yet realized under the sun is the New York Tribune.

The number for this morning contains six hundred and forty-one separate articles—from two-line advertisements to two-column essays—of which five hundred and ten are advertisements, the remainder, one hundred and thirty-one, belonging to the various departments of reading matter. The reading matter, however, occupies about one half of the whole space—nearly four of the eight broad pages, nearly twenty-four of the forty-eight columns. The articles and paragraphs which must have been written for this number, yesterday, or very recently, in the office or at the editors' residences,