The Short and Disastrous Life of the World’s Biggest Newspaper
I hesitate a moment at Stanford University’s Special Collections desk. “I got in touch about seeing the Constellation? The newspaper from 1859?” I ask Tim Noakes, the library’s head of public services.
“Oh”—he motions toward the front of the room, where a newspaper sprawls over an entire reading table—“the big one?”
An act of typographical hubris that long held the title of “world’s largest newspaper,” the July 4, 1859, special issue of The Illuminated Quadruple Constellation survives today in only a handful of libraries. Published in Manhattan and distributed nationally, it was printed on seventy-by-one-hundred-inch sheets—bigger than a king-size bed—and then folded twice to produce eight pages, each fifty inches long and thirty-five inches wide. Its footprint can hold roughly six copies of the New York Times. When I lay my phone down next to a copy in Stanford University’s rare books room, the effect is of a tugboat bobbing in the water next to a battleship.
One page of The Illuminated Quadruple Constellation is the size of 117 iPhone SEs.
“It cannot be excelled in its mammoth dimensions,” brags the front page, “because a sheet of any greater length and breadth would be absolutely unmanageable.” This is not an idle boast. Upon attempting to read this behemoth, I find myself walking sheepishly back to Noakes at his desk.
“We need two people to turn the pages,” I tell him.
You can easily hold one of the first American newspapers in one hand: Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick from 1690 approximates letter-sized paper. But as more modern-looking broadsheets emerged in the 1830s, the magic ingredients of disruptive media also appeared: new technology, IP theft, and a government loophole. The US lacked copyright protection for popular foreign authors like Charles Dickens; what it did have, though, were new steam-driven printing presses, and a far lower postal rate for newspapers than for books or magazines. The trick to steam-powered piracy, then, was somehow to cram a book into a newspaper.
“The Mastodon of American Newspapers” and “The Largest Paper in All Creation,” announced the Universal Yankee Nation in 1841. At about eleven square feet, it was twice the dimensions of a typical broadsheet. Other piratical behemoths like The New World, Brother Jonathan, and The Boston Notion soon followed. These “mastodon” or “bed-blanket” weeklies could provide a book’s worth of reading: Charles Dickens’s American Notes was gleefully ripped off in its entirety by The New World in a twelve-and-a-half-cent issue, days before his usual publisher could issue a book costing twice as much.
Inevitably, the mastodons turned their tusks on one another, each boasting of greater Brobdingnagian proportions than the last; the announcement of a “Double Double Yankee Nation” spurred a competing quadruple version of The Boston Notion (“The Mammoth ‘SUN-ECLIPSER,’ coming at last! Acres of entertainment!”). Not to be outdone, Brother Jonathan claimed “upward of 100 engravings” for its Christmas issue. Mastodon papers had a problem, though, and it wasn’t just how hard it was to turn their pages. They relied on a business model that could be destroyed with a stroke of a pen. After the Postal Act of 1845 limited the size allowed for the newspaper rate, they could be big, but not sun-eclipsing big.
All the stranger, then, when a baffling announcement by veteran publisher George Roberts appeared fourteen years later, in the New York Tribune, on June 30, 1859: “THE GREAT WONDER OF THE AGE! THE MASTODON OF NEWSPAPERS, PUBLISHED ONCE IN A HUNDRED YEARS! The subscriber announces that he will publish, and have for sale everywhere, on SATURDAY July 2, THE LARGEST SHEET OF PAPER EVER MADE AND PRINTED. It will be known as ‘THE ILLUMINATED QUADRUPLE CONSTELLATION.’ PRINTED ON ONE SHEET 70100 INCHES… GREAT CURIOSITY OF THE 19TH CENTURY.”
It seemed like an incredible promise. Roberts’s Constellation was a struggling weekly that hadn’t put out an issue in months, and assembling the largest newspaper ever was a tall order even for a thriving publisher.
Even more incredibly—he pulled it off.