Books in Brief: Newspaper Row

Newspaper Row: Journalism in the PreTelevision Era, by Herbert A. Kenny (Globe Pequot Press, 236 pp., $16.95)

Westbrook Pegler called it “The Era of Wonderful Nonsense,” those late-nineteenth-, early-to-mid-twentieth-century years when news coverage was more Front Page than Evening News. Radio and TV were still in the future, the telephone just coming into use. In Boston, most newspapers were concentrated on Water and Washington Streets, Boston’s famous Newspaper Row, and competition for circulation was fierce. The unofficial hero of Herbert Kenny’s light-hearted, wry, affectionate story of the antics of some very improper Bostonians is Edwin Atkins Grozier, a veteran of Joseph Pulitzer’s school of yellow journalism, who took over the failing Boston Post in 1891 and built its circulation to 600,000—tops in the city. Grozier had Boston palpitating over what he would do next: Send a naked man into the Maine forests for sixty days? Beat police divers to the missing head of Miss Susan Geary,

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Priscilla L. Buckley

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Newspaper Row: Journalism in the PreTelevision Era, by Herbert A. Kenny (Globe Pequot Press, 236 pp., $16.95)

Westbrook Pegler called it “The Era of Wonderful Nonsense,” those late-nineteenth-, early-to-mid-twentieth-century years when news coverage was more Front Page than Evening News. Radio and TV were still in the future, the telephone just coming into use. In Boston, most newspapers were concentrated on Water and Washington Streets, Boston’s famous Newspaper Row, and competition for circulation was fierce. The unofficial hero of Herbert Kenny’s light-hearted, wry, affectionate story of the antics of some very improper Bostonians is Edwin Atkins Grozier, a veteran of Joseph Pulitzer’s school of yellow journalism, who took over the failing Boston Post in 1891 and built its circulation to 600,000—tops in the city. Grozier had Boston palpitating over what he would do next: Send a naked man into the Maine forests for sixty days? Beat police divers to the missing head of Miss Susan Geary,