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Featured Resource: The American Newspaper
Repository
Joshua Compton
The American Newspaper Repository (www.oldpapers.org), a
non-profit corporation devoted to preserving original historic
newspapers, holds the world’s only surviving long runs
of newspapers like the New York World and the Chicago Tribune.
Besides containing one-of-its-kind writings by such legendary
writers as H. L. Mencken, Mark Twain, Walter Lippman, Booker
T. Washington, and Rebecca West, the collection also includes
thousands of rotogravure photographs and color illustrations,
including comics and maps. The Repository, founded by Nicholson
Baker, is located in Rollinsford, New Hampshire, and is available
to researchers by appointment.
The collection serves as a unique resource for political
communication scholars interested in visual communication,
early media, and photojournalism. Additionally, the repository
is one of the few resource collections that allow hands-on
access to original documents.
Baker was motivated to begin the Repository
when he discovered that libraries were literally throwing
away thousands of original newspapers and instead, relying
solely on microfilmed, black-and-white copies. Consider
the plight of the World, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York
serial that ran in the late 1800s. Early in its run, the
World used four-color Sunday spreads—motivated by
the increased sales that came with color illustrations.
According to Baker’s 2002 expose of newspaper dumping
practices, Double Fold, one million people read Pulitzer’s
World each day. But in the 1950s, the New York Public
Library threw away their half-million-page collection
of the World. Now, all that remains are microfilm copies—in
monochrome, and as Baker describes, “wretchedly”
done.
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The problem is unique to the 21st century.
“Fifty years ago,” wrote Baker in the New
Yorker, “there were bound sets, even double
sets, of all the major metropolitan dailies safely stored
in libraries around the United States.” But now,
citing the fragile nature of newsprint and lack of storage
space, libraries are throwing the newspapers away.
The fate of our nation’s newspapers seems even
more tragic when we consider that the rational used
to justify tossing the papers may be terribly flawed.
Contrary to popular belief—and contrary to the
sales-pitches of microfilm companies in the mid-1900s—newsprint
is not doomed to disintegrate. Instead, as Baker recounts
in Double Fold, binding newspapers into large
books usually does a fine job of preserving even lower
quality newsprint, as the pressure of the book creates
an airtight protection of the inner pages. |
He points out in his New Yorker article
“a year of a daily paper would fill fifty-two
volumes and occupy less than half the Barbie aisle in
a Toys R Us.” Indeed, he argues, the same millions
of dollars channeled into microfilming could be redistributed
to fund relatively inexpensive storage warehouses.
Baker’s largest competitors in his quest to obtain
and protect these newspapers are for-profit companies,
like Historic Newspaper Archives. Historic Newspaper
Archives specializes in “original keepsake newspapers.”
Customers order newspapers from special dates—like
a family member’s birthday—at a cost of
$35.55, and employees of Historic Newspaper Archives
cut that issue from their stored, bound volumes. Until
the papers are cut, the issues are in pristine condition.
Baker has labeled Historic Newspaper Archives as “a
ghastly anti-library.”
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