Diario de México, 1805: a daily sold for half a real, with a locked box at every stall for anyone to post copy into
A daily paper began in Mexico City in 1805, half a sheet, sold from early morning at half a real at twelve named stalls. At each stall stood a box locked with a key and slotted at the top: anyone could drop in a notice, a piece of news or a composition, free of charge, and the papers were collected every afternoon. Its prospectus set out what it would print and one thing it would not — matters of high politics and government.
Why this wins its question: The Diario de México is usually mentioned in passing as an early daily and then summarised from later histories. This is the first volume itself, opened page by page: the title page with its printer, the prospectus with the price, the twelve named stalls, the locked boxes that let anyone in the city publish free of charge, the subscription tariff for readers a week's post away, and — on the same sheet — the sentence forbidding contributors to touch politics and government. It also carries the thing nobody quotes, a parish return of baptisms, marriages, burials and vaccinations printed in a newspaper with a standing request to the other parish priests for the same figures every month.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The title page of the first volume reads "DIARIO DE MEXICO dedicado al Exmô. Señor Don Jose de Yturrigaray Caballero profeso del Orden de Santiago, Teniente General de los Reales Exercitos, Virrey Governador y Capitan General de N. E., Presidente de su Real Audiencia &c. &c. TOMO I", and below it "CON LICENCIA DEL SUPERIOR GOVIERNO. En la Imprenta de Doña Maria Fernandez Jauregui, calle de Santo Domingo. Año de 1805." The paper was dedicated to the sitting viceroy, printed under a government licence, and printed by a woman running her own press. The Google Books catalogue record for this same digitised volume names a different printer (the office of Mariano José de Zúñiga y Ontiveros); the title page as opened and read is what is reported here.
The prospectus, headed "IDEA DEL DIARIO ECONOMICO DE MEJICO", declines to make large promises — "está la gente tan escarmentada de los grandes prospectos" — and instead lists what the paper will carry. Religious notices first; then everything concerning the good of society and public order, "para qe llegue à noticia de todos los Ciudadanos: porqe los qe ignoran las disposiciones, y providencias de policia, y de buen govierno, mal podrán observarlas"; the notable causes heard publicly in the superior tribunals; the advances of the sciences and the arts; and the whole of private and domestic economy — auctions, consignments and foodstuffs arriving, furniture for sale or wanted, things lost and found, servants seeking places and places seeking servants, posts falling vacant, the current prices of the most consumed goods, and who has moved house or arrived in or left the capital.
It also undertook to print deaths, and gave a reason that is a small piece of social observation in itself: although the bells announce with excess the death of the powerful and of first-rank officials, notice of the death of others whom many would find it convenient to know of in time tends to be delayed — "Por ésto, y otras consideraciones abrá su artículo de necrolójia."
The physical terms are stated exactly. "Se dará este periódico todos los dias como indica su titulo: su estension será de medio pliego, de la misma letra qe la de este prospecto: se venderá desde temprano à medio real en los doce puestos señalados al efecto" — the parián opposite the coach stand, and eleven estanquillos named one by one: the corner of the Profesa, opposite the post office, del Ángel, the arcades of San Agustín and of Portacoeli, the post-office bridge, the corner of Santa Inés, three in the calle del Reloj, two in Santo Domingo, that of Tacuba and the Cruz del Factor.
The distribution network doubled as an intake network, and this is the part worth quoting whole. "En cada uno de éstos mismos puestos abrá una caja cerrada con llave, en qe se echarán por la abertura de arriba los avisos, noticias, ó composiciones, qe se qieran publicar por medio del diario, en la inteligencia de qe los interesados no tendrán que pagar cosa alguna, de qe todas las tardes se recojerán los papeles qe contengan todas las cajas, y de qe se cuidará de comprobar las especies que lo requieran." A locked box at twelve street corners, emptied every afternoon, free to use, with the paper undertaking to check the items that needed checking.
Subscription terms are set out beside them: subscribers signed at the stall of Don Juan Bautista Arizpe in the calle de la Monterilla, paying fourteen reales a month in advance, for which copies were carried to their houses early in the mornings and the supplements and the volume index were given free; subscriptions were taken on any day of the month provided the back numbers of the month were taken too; subscribers outside Mexico City paid for at least three months with twelve reales more per quarter and received the paper weekly by post, franked, and letters were to be addressed "Al Diarista de Méjico" post-free, "pues de otra manera no se sacarán".
The limits are printed in the same prospectus, by the paper itself, and they are the counterweight to everything above. Letters, discourses and other compositions sent in would be given room "siempre qe lo merezcan", provided they keep the laws of decorum and "el respeto debido à las autoridades establecidas, qe no se mezclen en materias de la alta politica, y de govierno (en qe por lo comun yerran groseramente los qe las tratan fuera de los unicos puestos en qe pueden verse por todos sus aspectos) y qe no ofendan à nadie"; epigrams, fables and short verse were admitted if they contained no personalities. The paper also promised not to trespass on the branches reserved exclusively to the official political-economic gazette of the capital, and not to injure the Almacén de Noticias, whose regulation it quotes at article 24. A public letterbox existed inside a licensing system that reserved government, and news as a revenue farm, to others.
The volume prints its own subscriber lists, and they show who was reading. Alongside private individuals stand corporate subscribers — the Real Tribunal de Minería, the Apostólico Colegio de San Fernando — a woman, Doña Mariana del Valle, and named men who are the intellectual furniture of the city: the sculptor and architect Manuel Tolsá, the botanist Vicente Cervantes, the bibliographer José Mariano Beristáin, José Gil de León as rector of the Colegio de Minería, José María Couto as rector of San Ildefonso, the corregidor Miguel Domínguez.
The out-of-town section of the same lists gives each subscriber's place, and the spread is the evidence that a city daily was being read across the viceroyalty by post: Veracruz, Puebla, Querétaro, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Durango, Oaxaca, Valladolid, Toluca, Texcoco, Xalapa, Orizaba, Cholula, Colima, Acapulco, Parras, Chilpancingo, Uruapan, Ixmiquilpan, haciendas such as Regla and San Gabriel, and the mining camps of Real de Catorce, Zimapán, Taxco, Cosalá, Sombrerete, Mazapil and Temascaltepec. Curates, tithe collectors, subdelegates, a naval commandant at Veracruz and hacienda administrators appear among them.
The paper also became a voluntary vital-statistics bulletin, and the mechanism is visible on page 144. After the lost-property notices it prints: "En el discurso del próximo pasado mes de Octubre á habido en la Parroquia de San Miguel de esta Ciudad 32 bautismos, 4 matrimonios, 29 entierros, y 176 vacunados", thanks Dr Juan José Güereña for communicating it, and adds the hope that the other parish priests will do the same, "remitiendonos la nota de cada mes en los dos, ó tres dias primeros del siguiente". A vaccination column stands in a parish return published in a newspaper, in the year the smallpox vaccine was being kept alive across Spanish America.
The volume's own index shows what the intake boxes and the editors actually produced over the first months: hymns for rising and for going to bed, fables and epigrams, a letter on the fallibility of medicine, a mineral washery, the situation of Guanajuato in a sonnet, orthographic quarrels and their answers, the abuse of comic actors, the ignorance of midwives, the whipping of children in schools, the want of foundling houses in the cities of the kingdom "con un caso orroroso", numbers vaccinated in Tlatelolco, an extract of a chemical memoir with the translator's notes, the foundation of a university chair, and a physics discourse by Juan José de Oteyza delivered on Friday 8 November.
One further feature of the printed text is worth recording because it is visible on every page of the prospectus: the Diario used a reformed, broadly phonetic orthography — "qe" for que, "ay" and "abrá" without the h, "Méjico" with a j, "ecsiste" and "ecsactitud" for existe and exactitud, "necrolójia" for necrología. It is the spelling reform of the late Spanish Enlightenment carried into a mass-circulation daily rather than a grammarian's treatise.
What this volume establishes and what it does not should be stated. It establishes, from the paper's own imprint and prospectus, the daily periodicity, the price, the format, the twelve points of sale, the free intake boxes, the subscription tariff, the editorial contract and its political exclusion; and, from the body of the volume, the subscriber geography, the parish returns and the range of matter printed. It does not establish circulation, how many contributions arrived or were rejected, how long the paper lasted, or the frequently repeated claim that it was the first daily newspaper of Spanish America — a superlative that needs a comparative bibliography this volume cannot supply, and that is therefore not asserted here.