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January through the years via the lens of Rare & Early Newspapers…
January 13, 2020 by GuyHeilenman · Leave a Comment
Walk with us back through time to see what noteworthy, historic and collectible events occurred during the month of January. In so doing, we hope you’ll agree: “History is never more fascinating than when it’s read from the day it was first reported.”
January Through Time
Announcing: Catalog #290 (for January, 2020) is now available…
January 7, 2020 by GuyHeilenman · Leave a Comment
- Catalog 290 (in its entirety)
- Noteworthy Catalog 290 ($250+)
- Combined Catalogs (current, w/ remnants of previous)
Don’t forget about this month’s DISCOUNTED ISSUES.
(The links above will redirect to the latest catalog in approx. 30 days, upon which time it will update to the most recent catalog.)
Announcing: Catalog #288 (for November, 2019) is now available…
November 4, 2019 by GuyHeilenman · Leave a Comment
- Catalog 288 (in its entirety)
- Noteworthy Catalog 288 ($250+)
- Combined Catalogs (current, w/ remnants of previous)
Don’t forget about this month’s DISCOUNTED ISSUES.
(The links above will redirect to the latest catalog in approx. 30 days, upon which time it will update to the most recent catalog.)
Snapshot 1692… Now you see it…
October 28, 2019 by GuyHeilenman · Leave a Comment
Now you see it… Now you really see it. As one who cannot identify people’s faces if they are more than a few feet away, I really appreciate a good pair of glasses. It is hard to imagine a time when eye-glasses were a luxury, and even what was available was rather rudimentary. Thankfully, in the late 1600’s, an inventor developed a passion for optics, and made significant progress towards helping those with poor eyesight see well. The King and Queen of England took notice and he soon became their personal optician. Although quite rare, we came across an early advertisement for his services within an issue of The Athenian Mercury:
Announcing: Catalog #287 (for October, 2019) is now available…
October 1, 2019 by GuyHeilenman · Leave a Comment
- Catalog 287 (in its entirety)
- Noteworthy Catalog 287 ($250+)
- Combined Catalogs (current, w/ remnants of previous)
Don’t forget about this month’s DISCOUNTED ISSUES.
(The links above will redirect to the latest catalog in approx. 30 days, upon which time it will update to the most recent catalog.)
Announcing: Catalog #284 (for July, 2019) is now available…
July 2, 2019 by GuyHeilenman · Leave a Comment
- Catalog 284 (in its entirety)
- Noteworthy Catalog 284 ($250+)
- Combined Catalogs (current, w/ remnants of previous)
Don’t forget about this month’s DISCOUNTED ISSUES.
(The links above will redirect to the latest catalog in approx. 30 days, upon which time it will update to the most recent catalog.)
Announcing: Catalog #283 (for June, 2019) is now available…
June 4, 2019 by GuyHeilenman · Leave a Comment
- Catalog 283 (in its entirety)
- Noteworthy Catalog 283 ($250+)
- Combined Catalogs (current, w/ remnants of previous)
Don’t forget about this month’s DISCOUNTED ISSUES.
(The links above will redirect to the latest catalog in approx. 30 days, upon which time it will update to the most recent catalog.)
Announcing: Catalog #282 (for May, 2019) is now available…
April 30, 2019 by GuyHeilenman · Leave a Comment
- Catalog 282 (in its entirety)
- Noteworthy Catalog 282 ($250+)
- Combined Catalogs (current, w/ remnants of previous)
Don’t forget about this month’s DISCOUNTED ISSUES.
(The catalog links above will redirect to the latest catalog in approx. 30 days, upon which time it will update to the most recent catalog.)
I’m New Here: Week Eleven…
April 26, 2019 by Stephanie Williams · 4 Comments
Now that I have been here for a couple of months, the fuzziness is clearing a little bit more. Even better, to my way of thinking, is a growing familiarity with names and voices of some long-time collectors. It’s a cheery thing to have someone greet you by name with an optimistic lilt to their new request. At least, it is a very cheerful thing to me and I have a growing collection for whom I feel a certain ownership. 
It helps the general air of camaraderie that I am getting it right at least as often as I get it wrong these days.
One of the customers I am silently referring to as “mine” has a list of dates and titles, and he doles them out to me at a rate of about three or four a week. He fits that category the crew here refers to as “research request”, and I am always happy when he calls or emails. Like some collectors, this gentleman is pursuing a theme, and his quests for pertinent people or events can span more than two hundred years. There are sections of our archives that I now find quickly, and those titles are easily located and verified for desired content (by people much more proficient than I). Occasionally, there is a request that leads me to a part of the archives I would swear was not there the last time I searched that quadrant.
This week an assignment took me up to the ninth row of aisle WC. After pulling out the very bottom volume (these are anywhere from ten to fifteen pounds each, and stacked four or five high) I swooshed down to find a table upon which to search the pages for the relevant issue. And that’s where I began to learn brand new things. This volume, all wrapped and sealed as if ready for shipping, surely required a different process than I had used on previous queries. But when asked, both of my sources responded with faint groans and some muttered utterances that still perplex me. The upshot was that it is all the fault of some fellow who wanted to increase the profit margin on newspapers and led the industrial trend to switch from rag paper to newsprint made exclusively of wood pulp. Consequently, a newspaper from 1600’s or 1700’s is able to be folded and rolled and thoroughly read — while a New York Times from June of 1900 can crumble just from attempting to lift a page.
A name was uttered — and I would repeat it if I knew I had the facts just right. But I don’t even understand clearly what makes the paper so bad. It has something to do with acidic materials used to create the wood pulp that damaged the integrity of the pages over a period of time…
It takes me back to Walt Whitman, with apologies for the repetition. His chatty interview with Robert Ingersoll was published in the pulpish time of The World (NY) dated October, 26, 1890. The content is rich with dialogue and illustrations, but there aren’t many copies that survived, due to their fragility. Thankfully, the publishing houses learned from their mistakes and by the 1930’s changes were made.
Anyway, I am pleased to be making your acquaintance, and now know how to treat future pulpish requests, should they arrive.
I’m New Here…Weeks Nine & Ten
April 19, 2019 by Stephanie Williams · 1 Comment
Since my entries are personal perspective, and this is a significant week in the Christian calendar, my post carries a tinge of my own religious convictions. Please skip reading if such things offend you. After today I’ll endeavor to quash my worldview until a similar time next year…
There are newspapers inventoried in this facility that are so old they preceded the term, and are referred to by those in the know as a newsbook or a “coronto”. At least, that is my sketchy understanding. This week I am thinking about things that have survived generations, inventions, wars and cosmic changes. The listing that caught my eye was a title from 1629, banned in 1632 –but then given special license to continue six years later. Wikipedia says, “In 1638 they were granted a patent from King Charles I for the publication of news and history, in return for a £10 annual donation toward the upkeep of St. Paul’s Cathedral…” And, of course, I wanted to see this for myself. The small volume sold in 2015, just days after it was made available, but I was able to find a German newsbook from 1607 that I could look at. It wasn’t in a vault, but neatly cataloged and filed with all the other items in the seventeenth century inventory. There are so many treasures, I suppose a vault would have to be the size of a warehouse — which indeed it is. AUSSFUHRLICHER BERICHT was accessible, and I was able to pull the folder, open it on a surface, and even lift the clear archival cover in order to take a photograph without the obstruction of a reflected glare. Not many people have the privilege of holding a publication that is over four hundred years old, and I know myself to be ridiculously undeserving.
But this week Paris has superimposed itself on my mental wanderings. As for much of the western world, images of flames engulfing an icon that has stood for eight hundred years are incomprehensible. At a certain point old things seem to become everlasting. Particularly, stone cathedrals are expected to survive history itself. Invasion, famine, revolution and disease have moved around that block work for nearly a millennium. But we have records here at History’s Newsstand of many seemingly immovable things that have eventually yielded, and those accounts are interspersed with all the common themes of humanity that seem unhampered by the passage of time.
This is the week that Notre Dame burned. It is also the week before Easter — the darkness and mourning of “Good Friday” so closely followed by the joyful resurrection of Easter Sunday.
There is destruction and devastation, but there is also redemption. It’s the common cycle of the accounts told within these pages of history that are so neatly sorted, labeled, and shelved for retrieval. Obituaries and birth announcements. Demolitions and groundbreakings. Political structures that rise and fall, and new ones that rise again.
“A time to every purpose under heaven.”
Brokenness and healing.