The Dispatch in a New dress.
The Richmond Dispatch appears this morning in a new dress; and this new dress is a
types of the advancement of
Richmond in manufacturing enterprise and independence.
The suit of types in which it is now equipped was manufactured in this city, at the foundry of
Messrs. Walker &
Pelouze. It is the first ever manufactured south of
Baltimore.
This fact adds no little to the pride and pleasure that we always feel in presenting the Dispatch to its readers in a spick and span new suit.
We are sure our friends sympathize in this sentiment.
The introduction of new types into the columns of the Dispatch, is an event of far too frequent occurrence to be as profitable as agreeable.
The large amount of its circulation subjects the types on which it is printed to such harsh and severe usage, that they are soon battered and worn so as to impair their good appearance.
Every experiment has been made to harden the type metal, in order to make it more durable; and though a great improvement has been made in it, still, in circulations such as ours, it is found that nothing can make it proof against the wear and tear of the powerful machinery it has to pass through at lightning speed.
It is, nevertheless, a great satisfaction to us to renew our types and improve the Dispatch as often as that is necessary, and as much as it costs.
Time was when daily lists in this city were numbered by hundreds, and then a font of types lasted somewhere about a decade.
The intervals of renewal were long, and the event, when it did come, was quite an excitement.--A famous veteran of the types in those days indulged himself upon such occasions in prolonged and devoted sprees.
Taking care to bring the paper out first in the new dress, he placed the earliest copies in his hat, and hurried off to the restaurants to exhibit it to admiring crowds.
Toasting the types, the paper, the editors, the printers and the devil, he soon got a brick in his hat instead of the papers, and commenced a cruise (as he called it,) of a week or two, which wound up with his being picked up foundered at sea, and towed home for overhauling and refitting.--Upon his reappearance, he was himself a type of the battered font, which had given place to the new. But times have changed, and the renewal of the dress of the Dispatch excites not half the notice such an event in other days occasioned.
The Dispatch has now, we suppose, in newspaper life, reached the period of adolescence.
It is in its eleventh year.
We used to speak of its youth and the smart appearance of the boy in his new suit.
That time so interesting to parents, has passed, and we look at him now in his maturity; and though the tender solicitude inspired by his earlier struggles in relieved by the matured life and solid position he has attained, we still regard him with a proper pride and delight in every improvement he displays.
The reader will pardon, we are sure, thus much of egotism.
We take the occasion as fitting to thank our friends and the public in general for the favor so widely and liberally shown the Dispatch.--Its success has been as steady as the growth of thriving commercial communities, and now it exhibits a condition of prosperity unexampled by the
Southern press.
To the public, and to whatever of tact and industry we may possess, we are indebted for this.
We can only promise to continue our exertions to furnish the people with a really valuable newspaper and a fair and just journal, devoted to the prosperity and welfare of our own city and State, and true to the rights and honor of the
South.
With these great causes we desire to prosper, and when they fail and fall, so may we!
