On August 26, 1835, a fledgling newspaper called the brought to New York the first accounts of remarkable lunar discoveries. A series of six articles reported the existence of life on the moon — including unicorns, beavers that walked on their hind legs, and four-foot-tall flying man-bats. In a matter of weeks it was the most broadly circulated newspaper story of the era, and the , a working-class upstart, became the most widely read paper in the world. An exhilarating narrative history of a divided city on the cusp of greatness, and tale of a crew of writers, editors, and charlatans who stumbled on a new kind of journalism, tells the surprisingly true story of the penny papers that made America a nation of newspaper readers.