The Clipper: Stage and Ring

The New York Clipper was the great American weekly of the stage and the sporting field. Frank Queen took it over in 1853 and turned it into the paper the whole entertainment world read: the theater and the variety hall, the circus and the minstrel troupe, the prize ring, the billiard room, the rowing match, and the young game of baseball, all covered in the same crowded, tightly-set columns. Its front pages carried bold engraved mastheads and the occasional portrait block — a champion pugilist, a famous trotting horse, a stage favorite — the kind of cheap, vivid illustration that trained a mass audience to read pictures alongside print. For seventy years it was the trade bible of American show business, the paper that logged who was playing where, and a direct ancestor of Variety and Billboard. Absorbed by Variety in 1924, it closed a run that spanned minstrelsy to vaudeville. These issues are public-domain scans, digitally restored and presented at comicbooks.com from the Villanova University Digital Library.