Sometimes the real impact of a book or a work of art comes from allowing an element that might seem tangential to play a starring role. Opera or theater sets, for example, or the building that houses a fresco or the piazza that surrounds a fountain, can turn out to be essential to a work’s artistic achievement.

In Matthew Goodman’s The Sun and the Moon, it’s the terrific background information on what it meant to be a newspaperman in mid-19th-century New York City that makes the oddball story he narrates so fascinating. Here it’s both an arresting subtitle and the wealth of data, anecdote and historical detail that deserve credit for gripping the reader from the get-go.

“Lunar Man-Bats?” In order to understand how the nation’s largest city came to believe that our moon supported life, Goodman first lets us in on what New York’s reading public in the 1830s was like, where they lived, what they ate, how they supported and amused themselves. Then he homes in on the era’s newspapers, how they were written, who edited and owned them, how they were sold and what each paper’s demographics were like.

Like the proverbial professor whose digressions vie with his lectures for pride of place, Goodman allows his story to ramify in the oddest ways. And it all, somehow, makes the city come alive: crowds stare at Audubon prints in a bookseller’s windows; a private museum displays “a sculpture of the Virgin Mary carved from a single elephant’s tusk;” rioters break into a local hospital and re-bury all the cadavers exhumed by medical students.

Embedded within this vast expanse of bizarre detail (think Breughel or Bosch) lies the book’s central oddity, a newspaper’s series on what purported to be Sir William Herschel’s discovery of life on the moon. Herschel was the century’s preeminent astronomer, but what editor Richard Allen Locke of The Sun did with Herschel’s observations amounted to wholesale forgery. And the public ate it up, making The Sun, the city’s first one-cent newspaper, an overnight sensation.

At the same time as Goodman traces the development of the complex hoax, he also manages to tell the fascinating story of one Joice Heth, a former slave whom P.T. Barnum touted as the world’s oldest human (161!), and to recount Edgar Allan Poe’s assertions that The Sun’s moon stories were plagiarized from one of his published tales. Poe and Barnum and Joice Heth wander in and out of The Sun and the Moon like visiting comets, but it all makes sense in this strangely captivating book that bears an uncanny similarity to one of Barnum’s zaniest sideshows.

antjlewis@yahoo.com