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 70×100 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.
“Ready?” Tim asks. We hold opposite edges of a page and turn it in tandem, like we’re making a bed.
You don’t so much read an Illuminated Quadruple Constellation as behold it. When I actually do try to read it, I feel like I might be voiding the warranty on my brain. Each page is thirteen columns wide. Even the steel engravings scattered across the front page—a hodgepodge of President James Buchanan, Andrew Jackson, Harvard president Edward Everett, and the like—scarcely alter the overpowering amount of type. The Constellation limited its engravings to one side of its massive sheet during printing; because each sheet is folded into eight pages, there are pictures on pages 1, 4 to 5, and 8, while on the paired facing pages of 2 to 3 and 6 to 7, there is only verbiage, sometimes nearly running off the bottom of the page altogether. The effect is of standing under a waterfall of text, amid a ceaseless roar of words.
At a hefty fifty cents, or about nineteen dollars today, the Constellation wasn’t cheap—unlike its forebearers, it didn’t qualify for cheap postage—but in classic mastodon fashion, its content was still more about quantity than quality. Along with newly commissioned shockers like “A Night in the Devil’s Den; or, the Gallows Tree!” and the romance novel “Hagar; Or, The Twin Beauties,” the Constellation ran a celebratory poem whose tetrameter of alternating seven- and eight-syllable lines includes this line-break atrocity:
Then from his pocket he drew forth
The—New York CONSTELLATION,
The best and largest paper pub-
Lished in our Yankee nation.
Still, to lead his Herculean effort, Roberts hired none other than Park Benjamin—a champion of Nathaniel Hawthorne, mentor to a young Walt Whitman, and a man who, Edgar Allan Poe once marveled, “has exerted an influence scarcely second to that of any editor in the country.” So the Constellation’s pages include some pointedly literary work as well: an excerpt from Oliver Wendell Holmes’s The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, a poem by Lydia Sigourney, and a rerun of the New York Sun’s 1835 “Moon Hoax.”
The real entertainment, though, is in the ads, which include notices for Brandreth Pills (“A Medicine Which Often Cures and Cannot Possibly Injure”), Volcanic Repeating Fire Arms (“10,000 men armed with this terrible weapon, would be equal to 300,000 armed in the ordinary way”), and the Elliptic Bed Spring Company (“We now see no room for improvement in this invention”).
With their big and ornate typesetting, the ads are blessedly readable. The rest of the paper requires walking around the table and leaning all the way over at a perpendicular angle to browse essays like “Never Marry a Woman Until She’s Had the Small Pox.” I take more than a hundred photos of The Illuminated Quadruple Constellation, roughly gridding out each page. It will be easier, I decide, to read it later on my phone.
Upon the Constellation’s nationwide release, The New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette pronounced it a “MONSTER PAPER… [this] could have originated no where but in this go-ahead country.” The Weekly Telegraph of Macon, Georgia, reserved judgment: “When we get a ladder applicable to the purpose, we shall read the paper.” Most papers had a response like that of The Daily Picayune of New Orleans: “It is a mammoth, a leviathan, a mastodon, a whale of a newspaper.”
Close inspection, though, reveals cracks in its mighty edifice. The ostensible July 4 issue of the Constellation suspiciously resembles a long-delayed Christmas special: one item reports “Utah news to the 26th of November has been received,” while another invites poetry entries for the centenary of Robert Burns’s birth, a celebration thrown back in January. Then there’s the ad for “Professors Bond and Gein’s Skating Academy,” an enterprise notably ill suited for July. Even the featured romance novel (“Another instant, and she was in his arms. ‘Dearest Raymond!’ ‘My own Hagar!’”) turns out to be a mess. Sharp-eyed readers may have spotted that “Hagar; Or, the Twin Beauties” was in fact a wholesale lifting of E.D.E.N. Southworth’s 1850 novel The Deserted Wife. But not of all of it: it starts on page 7, confusingly jumps back to page 2 to conclude, and reproduces only the second half of the book. To read the first half, you needed to have bought the previous regular issue of the Constellation three months earlier.
The mammoth newspaper was, in fact, a mammoth disaster. Months earlier, freelancer Thomas Butler Gunn found publisher George Roberts “really ‘cornered’ about money”: Roberts owed Gunn forty-five dollars, but could pay only ten dollars of it. As Gunn left the office, a printer passed him on his way in, yelling at Roberts about money. And though the newspaper trumpeted the hiring of the literary tastemaker Park Benjamin, a surprise awaited readers on the Quadruple’s final page: the venture had lost ten thousand dollars, the famed editor was now the famed former editor, and he was suing the paper. “All association, interest, connection, or friendship… [with] PARK BENJAMIN has ceased,” the publisher announced.
The Illuminated Quadruple Constellation was less a tour de force than a Hail Mary pass, a desperate attempt at novelty to recoup mounting losses—and a reminder of how tough, even in its glory days, the newspaper business could be. The irrepressible Roberts couldn’t help suggesting that enough customer demand might result in a second edition with, as he bafflingly put it, “mostly, entirely new matter.” I’ve never found a second edition of the paper, perhaps because sales of the first do not seem to have gone well. Stanford’s copy has a red stamp of 20 over the initial fifty-cent cover price. A copy in Duke University’s library is restamped at fifteen cents. By December 1859, newspaper ads in The New York Times tried to unload “A MASTODON PAPER for the HOLIDAYS!” for as little as a dime.
Although George Roberts also hawked keepsake boxes for The Illuminated Quadruple Constellation (“so it can be placed upon the centre-table of the parlor… to be looked at with wonder by your children, and your children’s children… as the GREAT CURIOSITY OF THE 19TH CENTURY”), these days, Stanford is one of the few places where you can view a copy. But even after seeing it in person, a mystery persists: just how Roberts managed to produce it.
He would only hint that “it has taken eight weeks of unceasing labor of nearly forty persons.” The secret hid in a private company history at the printing press manufacturer R. Hoe & Company: “Much speculation and discussion were indulged in about their new monster press that could print such a sheet,” one printer mused. “As a matter of fact, it was folded to page size and printed on their ordinary press by refolding and running it through eight times.” It’s no wonder it took months to print.
The Illuminated Quadruple Constellation long held a place in the Guinness Book of World Records as the “largest newspaper,” but its 134-year reign ended with the June 14, 1993, special issue of Het Volk, of Ghent, Belgium. With pages of about fifty-six by thirty-nine inches, it’s six inches longer and four inches wider than the Constellation. But you can’t compare it to a regular issue of Het Volk anymore: that paper disappeared in a 2008 merger.
The Constellation probably remains the biggest paper ever printed in English, though, and with broadsheets going extinct like, well, mastodons, that record may stand. Occasionally a surviving copy turns up; one sold in 2009 fetched four hundred and eighty dollars, rather higher than its original cover price. Its auction listing remains the best advice ever given for a would-be reader:
“Not recommended,” it notes, “for reading on the subway.”
