in his pocket. More than half of this sum was exhausted while he made
vain efforts to find employment. Many refused to employ him, in the
belief that he was a runaway apprentice, and his poor, ill-fitting
apparel and rustic look were everywhere greatly against him. At last he
found work on a 32mo New Testament, set in agate, double columns, with a
middle column of notes in pearl. It was so difficult and so poorly paid
that other printers had all abandoned it. He barely succeeded in making
enough to pay his board bill, but he finished the task, and thus found
subsequent employment easier to get.
In January 1833 Greeley formed a partnership with Francis V. Story, a
fellow-workman. Their combined capital amounted to about $150. Procuring
their type on credit, they opened a small office, and undertook the
printing of the _Morning Post_, the first cheap paper published in New
York. Its projector, Dr Horatio D. Shepard, meant to sell it for one
cent, but under the arguments of Greeley he was persuaded to fix the
price at two cents. The paper failed in less than three weeks, the
printers losing only $50 or $60 by the experiment. They still had a
_Bank Note Reporter_ to print, and soon got the printing of a tri-weekly
paper, the _Constitutionalist_, the organ of some lottery dealers.
Within six months Story was drowned, but his brother-in-law, Jonas
Winchester, took his place in the firm. Greeley was now asked by James
Gordon Bennett to go into partnership with him in starting _The Herald_.
He declined the venture, but recommended the partner whom Bennett
subsequently took. On the 2nd of March 1834, Greeley and Winchester
issued the first number of _The New Yorker_, a weekly literary and news
paper, the firm then supposing itself to be worth about $3000. Of the
first number they sold about 100 copies; of the second, nearly 200.
There was an average increase for the next month of about 100 copies per
week. The second volume began with a circulation of about 4550 copies,
and with a loss on the first year's publication of $3000. The second
year ended with 7000 subscribers and a further loss of $2000. By the end
of the third year _The New Yorker_ had reached a circulation of 9500
copies, and had sustained a total loss of $7000. It was published seven
years (until the 20th of September 1841), and was never profitable, but
it was widely popular, and it gave Greeley, who was its sole editor,
much prominence. On the 5th of July 1836 Greeley married Miss Mary Y.
Cheney, a Connecticut school teacher, whom he had met in a Grahamite
(vegetarian) boarding-house in New York.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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