Sunday Mercury (New York)
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| Type | Weekly newspaper (1839–1893) Daily (1893–1896) |
|---|---|
| Format | broadsheet |
| Founded | 1839 |
| Ceased publication | 1896 |
| Headquarters | Manhattan |
| Circulation | 145,000 (1861) |
| OCLC number | 9588307 |
The Sunday Mercury (1839–1896) (sometimes referred to as the New York Sunday Mercury) was a weekly Sunday newspaper published in New York City that grew to become the highest-circulation weekly newspaper (at least by its own claims) in the United States at its peak. It was known for publishing and popularizing the work of many notable 19th-century writers, including Charles Farrar Browne and Robert Henry Newell, and was the first Eastern paper to publish Mark Twain. It was also the first newspaper to provide regular coverage of baseball, and was popular for the extensive war correspondence from soldiers it published during the Civil War.
Prior to 1825, no American newspapers published editions on Sunday, out of respect to Sabbath. Over time, however, this created a niche for weekly newspapers published on Sunday to flourish.
The Mercury originated as the Sunday Morning Visiter, and was first published on May 12, 1839. By 1840, it changed its name to the Sunday Mercury. It initially gained some notice for its theatrical coverage and so-called "machine poetry" (a 19th-century euphemism for slavishly following the "rules" of poetry without any inspiration). By the fall of 1842 the paper had a circulation of 3,000, ranking it third among New York's Sunday papers, trailing the New York Herald’s Sunday edition and The Atlas. By the summer of 1844, the Herald took note of the growth of the Sunday papers, calling them "partly literary, partly gossiping, partly silly, partly smart, partly stupid, partly namby-pamby."
Elbridge Gerry Paige (1813–1859) and Samuel Nichols (1809?–1854) were the two key editors of the Mercury in its early years, and Augustus Krauth joined them as a one-third owner in 1842.
Paige had success with his Short Patent Sermons published in the paper (from its outset) under the pseudonym "Dow Junior" (a reference to famous eccentric preacher Lorenzo Dow who died in 1834), which literary magazines such as The Knickerbocker lauded for their odd and original wit. Paige left the paper in 1849 and went to California, where he continued to publish Dow Jr. sermons in The Golden Era, but ultimately was unsuccessful there and is said to have died in extreme poverty in 1859.
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