1484

NV - Virginia City,Storey County - 1887 - The Footlight Daily Newspaper

Currency:USD Category:Collectibles / Western Americana Start Price:500.00 USD Estimated At:1,000.00 - 2,000.00 USD
NV - Virginia City,Storey County - 1887 - The Footlight Daily Newspaper
Session D is a Mail-Bid Only Auction. Absentee bids will be accepted only. No live bidding will be allowed. All winners will be contacted after the auction. BIDDING ENDS MONDAY JUNE 27 AT 5PM PACIFIC TIME!!!
The paper offered for sale here is the last month of the Footlight’s original run. We have twenty-two issues from January 3 to 31. Very Fragile. It was an evening paper published by D. L. Brown. Its office was at 63 South C Street. Richard E. Lingenfelter and Karen Rix Gash, in their 1984 book, The Newspapers of Nevada: A History & Bibliography, 1854-1979, wrote “The Footlight was established in Virginia City in 1872, by J. Croall and Co. Croall was a pressman on the Evening Chronicle, and The Footlight was printed in that plant. It was issued a weekly as a theatrical advertising medium and contained the weekly program for Piper’s Opera House. By 1875, John W. Plant and John A. Mahanny became publishers, but Plant soon retired from the firm and David L. Brown replaced him[262]. Brown and Mahanny published the Footlight from a small office in the rear of their bookstore on the corner of C and Taylor streets. The columns of the paper were spicily written, and the Footlight soon came to be regarded as ‘the Punch of Nevada’ [263].



About 1880, Mahanny retired from the firm and D. L. Brown became sole editor and proprietor. Brown removed the press and material to new offices [as listed above], and suspending the weekly edition commenced publication of the Daily Evening Footlight on March 15, 1881. [The paper did not issue a Sunday edition. It ran] as a four-page, four-column, 10 by 13 inch sheet. It sold for $5 a year or one bit per week. [Brown suspended publication for two years] from November 17, 1884, to October 12, 1886. [Brown published the paper through the end of January 1887 when he began a] partnership with Alfred Chartz, [and began publishing] the Evening Report [263]. The new paper was also a six day publication. The partnership continued for about nine months before Chartz retired. Brown continued to run the paper for another year before suspending publication. Brown would resurface as the president of The Report Publishing Company in 1891 and ran the “paper for a few months, before it died again, this time not to be resurrected until August 1, 1897” [268]. The paper survived until May of 1904 before suspending publication forever.