Read All About It, 175 Years

In late April, the St. Paul Pioneer Press had its 175th anniversary. To mark the occasion, they published a magazine-sized insert with reprints of significant front pages (some are from the different newspapers that merged with the Pioneer Press).  

The reproductions are pretty small, compared to their original size, so reading the text without a magnifying glass isn't an option, but it's easy to compare the change in newspaper design over time.

Headlines as we think of them were not a thing in that first year, 1849. Other than the name of the newspaper, the largest type would qualify as only a subhead today. The next example shown, from 1858, had one all-caps headline setting (GLORIOUS NEWS!) announcing Minnesota's statehood, but it's only a single text column wide out of eight columns on the page. 

The beginning of the Civil War was treated to a smaller headline a few years later. Understatement was the style, driven partly by technical limitation.

Two front pages from 1865 make an interesting contrast. The end of the Civil War received something modern readers would recognize as appropriate treatment for a significant event:

Five days later, however, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was relegated to the one-column treatment:

Here's a close-up of the headline about Lincoln at the top of the sixth column:

I note the heavy black rules between all the text columns, however, and I think what happened was that news of Lincoln's murder was late-breaking, within the reality of the production schedule. They probably pulled some other story out of that spot at the last minute and replaced the usual thin rules between the columns, and that was all they had time to do before the deadline.

In contrast, with the "Peace Through Victory" edition on April 11, they knew the end of the war was at hand so they had that type and illustration lockup ready to go as soon as they heard by telegram that Lee had surrendered.   

The first actual news image that is shown in the reproductions is from March 1881, when the Minnesota State Capitol was destroyed by fire. And I haven't mentioned it before, but as on all of the foregoing front pages, it's jarring to see that and other serious stories juxtaposed with columns of ads for SHIRTS! HATS! and BAKING POWDER, among other things.

After that image of the Capitol, wood cuts or steel engravings are on every page, followed by halftone photos later.

One other oddity I wanted to report was the use of hyphens in display typography. As a typesetter who started in the early 1980s, I was taught to be sensitive to hyphens, and especially never to allow a hyphen to appear in display type. That does not appear to have been a nicety among newspaper typesetters. This example is from 1898:

Remember, this type was being set by hand, letter by letter, so it would have been just as easy — maybe easier — to set it without the hyphen than it was to set it with the hyphen. It just occurred to me that the goal was to fill out the line fully? But that seems totally unnecessary, versus making it easier to read.

Here are two other examples from years not long after that one:

1904

1907

In general in the 20th century, though, the front pages look more recognizable as front pages to a modern reader. The ads went away and some kind of significant headline or image usually dominates. The designs are still quite a jumble compared to the ones late in the century, but there's more visual hierarchy. And pretty soon, there's nary a display hyphen in sight.