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The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York

By Dan Danbom, Special to the Rocky

Published November 20, 2008 at 7 p.m.

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* Nonfiction. By Matthew Goodman. Basic Books, $26.95. Grade: B+

Book in a nutshell: Newspapers came to the masses in New York in the 1830s with the invention of the "penny press." Papers like The New York Sun offered readers equal parts crusade and carnival. Unlike more expensive, staid papers of the era, The Sun ran eye-popping stories like one about how a doctor used a bowl of milk to lure a snake from a patient's stomach, and one about a boy who whistled in his sleep.

Its publisher promised readers "bombastic panegyrics, jests, anecdotes, deaths, marriages, conundrums, enigmas, puns, poetry, acrostics and advertisements of every shade and color." But the Sun exceeded even its wildest non-whistling dreams when an iconoclastic writer named Richard Adams Locke began a series reporting amazing discoveries from an astronomer in South Africa whose powerful telescope enabled him to see life forms on the moon.

Locke held New York spellbound for days as he passed on sightings of unicorns, beaverlike animals that walked upright, horned bears and Lunar man-bats, whose amorous antics were too shocking even for the Sun's readers. The public ate it up. Crowds besieged the Sun building, clamoring for more papers and sending the Sun's circulation skyrocketing. Respected scientists validated the story and opined that there were undoubtedly similar forms of life on the sun.

The amazing thing is that when everyone figured out the stories were made up, no one felt cheated or bamboozled. Other papers cheerfully plagiarized the series. Everyone thought it a wonderful hoax, except Locke, who had an entirely different objective.

Best tidbit: Goodman captures the bare-knuckled nature of newspapers. One rival said the Sun had "a brace of blockheads for editors." Editors commonly referred to each other as contemptible and "reckless villains," "blackguards" and "lizards."

Pros: The story brings 1830s New York and its outlandish characters vividly to life.

Cons: The Sun and the Moon gets a bit out of orbit when Goodman interrupts the moon hoax to bring in tangential characters and extraneous material.

Final word: A fascinating account of the most successful hoax in the history of American journalism.