422
NOTES AND QUERIES. [11 s. ix. MAY 30,
of representatives of papers of all shades of
politics, and in doing so said that,
" in all the things with which I have been asso- ciated since I entered the profession, I never saw anything in which there was such real enthusiasm and delight as this presentation caused. I am more than proud to have been chosen by the profession to present the book it represents."
The publication by The Times of statistics of its sale is contrary to the traditions of the old-established press. Before the News- paper Stamp was abolished, the only means of arriving at the circulation of a paper was by reading the stamp returns issued from the Stamp Office, and this list was published in some of the papers. But those figures did not represent the actual sales, as the stamps on unsold copies were allowed for at Somerset House, the stamps being torn off from the copies for that purpose. These lists of stamps issued did not indicate the sale of a few privileged papers such as The Athenceum, The Builder, and Punch, which, not being strictly papers containing news, were allowed to publish both stamped and unstamped issues, the sale of the unstamped copies being by far the larger, as the ugly red stamp was a great disfigurement when copies were bound. There was so much difficulty in deciding what was actually news that Milner Gibson in 1851 obtained the appointment of a Select Committee to inquire into the working of the Newspaper Stamp Act, Mowbray Morris, the manager of The Times, being one of the most important witnesses ; but Parliament was slow in moving in those days, and it was not until the 15th of June, 1855, that the Newspaper Stamp Bill became law. It must be remem- bered that there was one gain attached to the purchase of a paper with the impressed stamp : it could be posted and reposted.
By the kind permission of the proprietors of The Times, I am enabled to place on record in ' N. & Q.' the official statement in that- paper on Friday, the 8th inst., which gave statistics of its sales during the past fifty years. The article says :
" It will be seen that the lowest period of the journal's fortunes was 1903, when the circulation was 35,000, and the highest 1866, the year of the Austrian campaign. The circulation to-day is practically five times larger than eleven years ago.
Average Daily Circulation. 1864 65,908
1865
1866
1867
1868
1869
1870
1871
64,850
70,673
61,571
61,173
58,971
62,013
63,122
1872
1873
1874
1875
1876
1877
1878
1879
1880
1881
1882
1883
1884
1885
1886
1887
1888
1889
1890
1891
1892
1893
1894
1895
1896
1897
1898
1899
1900
1901
1902
1903
1904
1905
1906
1907
1908
1909
1910
1911
1912
1913
May 1
2
4
5
6
.7
TO-DAY.
Average Daily Circulation
61,269
61,648
62,615
63,558
62,975
61,713
60,660
57,991
56,542
54,935
52,380
46,37$
48,345
46,581
46,693
45,230
44,236
41,958
40,568
41,214
40,455
40,004
37,868
37,359^
37,716
36,751
36,316
37,086
38,176
37,780
36,702
35,605
39,552
43,474
47,845
44,947
42,495
43,752
44,841
45,80ff
46,714
53,13a
170,100
169,925
172,350
171,650
170,550
170,825
" Not since the autumn of 1814 has The
Times passed through such an eventful period a* the present.
" It was in that year that the first newspaper ever printed by steam was issued from Printing House Square. The result gave The Times an immense and immediate advantage over its many competitors.
" Then, as now, the paper was confronted by a paper famine caused by the huge demand of its readers.
" It has been an open secret in the world of politics and publishing that since March 16 Printing House Square has been engaged in a desperate struggle to obtain a sufficient quantity of paper of the famous hard white quality associ- ated with The Times. The most careful estimate of the probable growth of The Times by the reduction in price was that the gross circulation of the journal would reach 80,000 copies, and i
