Democratic Sentinel, Volume 5, Number 17, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 June 1881 — The Price of Newspapers. [ARTICLE]

The Price of Newspapers.

Canadian newspaper publishers are becoming alive to what is due to themselves in return for their heavy outlay. By disregarding commercial considerations, the Toronto Mail lost the whole of its original capital (over $100,000) and the Toronto Globe, although much longer established aud better patronized as an advertising medium, was making no suitable returns for the capital invested. The result has been an advance of a dollar a year in the price of both papers. The Hamilton and London dailies have followed suit. Even now they are cheaper than papers of a similar class published in the United States, where they charge sl2 a year. Our Canadian city papers should go further and raise the price of their weeklies to something above the bare cost of the paper on which they are printed. No large weekly worth reading cau be published for less than two dollars a year, and even at that price it would not pay the proprietor unless there be a large cash advertising patronage. These so-called “cheap’’ papers are dear in the long run, for they must economize in some way, and that can only be done by curtailing matters which would otherwise be more liberally treated.— Stratford Beacon.

Bayard Taylor as a Letter-Writer. Taylor was a scholar in several literatures, but he was never a man to be satisfied with a smattering in any language. What he got he worked for, and so it was worth the having when he had made himself master of it. Letter-writ-ing seems now-a-days a “lost art.” In the hurry of this -present busy world there is not sufficient leisure for elaborate correspondence, there fofmerly was in the days of Cowper and Gray, two of the most charming epistolary geniuses that ever lived. But Taylor, like Dickens among modern authors, excelled as a letter-writer, and his briefest notes were sure to contain some felicitous expression, some humorous quip, worthy to be remembered. When his memoir is written, as it is sure to be before long, it is to be hoped his letters will be collected and given to the world with the story of his remarkable career as a traveler, poet and novelist.—-J. T. Fields, in the Congregationalist.