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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.
Literally, like the most overused words in 1937…
April 23, 2019 by GuyHeilenman · Leave a Comment
Overusing words and phrases is not merely a 21st century phenomenon. In 1937, Wilfred J. Funk, renowned author, poet, lexicographer, and publisher, took a pause from his responsibilities as the President of Funk and Wagnalls to formulate a list of the “most overworked words.” While Howard Hughes, Amelia Earhart, Adolf Hitler and Seabiscuit were capturing the headlines, the publishers of the Springfield Union (MA) managed to find a bit of front page print-space to post his list in their March 27, 1937 issue. Enjoy.
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.
They Put It In Print… FDR “packs” Supreme Court… In his own words…
April 12, 2019 by GuyHeilenman · Leave a Comment
The Springfield Union (MA), dated March 10, 1937, has the complete text of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fireside Chat in which he defends his rationale for “packing” the Supreme Court. As we stand at the brink of perhaps yet another similar moment in American political history, it is timely to consider his thinking – in his own words, and thanks to the editors of The Springfield Union, they put it in print. Enjoy.
Announcing: Catalog #281 (for April, 2019) is now available…
April 8, 2019 by GuyHeilenman · Leave a Comment
- Catalog 281 (in its entirety)
- Noteworthy Catalog 281 ($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 Eight
April 5, 2019 by Stephanie Williams · 2 Comments
Perhaps the most significant thing I have learned in my weeks here is that I don’t know much. And, as that sinks in I feel an urgency to get to work, because there is so much lost ground to cover! Even if Time stopped right now, it’s too late to catch up on the designations within mechanics, medicine, entertainment, science, culture, and everything else. Yet, I am optimistic of gaining a bit of yardage as I spend my days 
surrounded by thin slices of information, accumulated at such quantities that facts could be (by someone math-minded) measured in cubic feet.
“What kinds of things are collectors searching?” That was my early question, and I see now how gracious everyone was with their oft-repeated, non-committal replies.
People are looking for issues concerning as varied a range of topics or content as there are human beings. Early motorcycle polo matches had me perched fifteen feet skyward, balancing five volumes — each of which is half my height and wider than I can put my arms around. The issue I was seeking had some key content of wide appeal: Capone and his gang.
Mobsters are popular. So are serial killers and crime sprees. I skipped right over the portions of The Devil in the White City that dealt with the monster Henry Howard Holmes, and was instead caught up in the achievements of the human mind as exhibited in the Chicago World Fair. Here in our annals we have issues of Scientific American that feature Thomas Edison’s inventions, as well as multiple innovations of the 19th century — some of which were presented at that 1893 event! My mental censorship was so complete that I forgot the gruesome killings described in Erik Larson’s book altogether. But many people, for a myriad of reasons, are fascinated by details of historical mayhem. Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger and Jesse James‘ headlines still hold mass appeal.
But in this case, the Detroit Free Press of 1928 contained something more valuable to some than the headline “Capone Pal Slain”. The back page photograph of a group from Yonkers was the treasure I unearthed for a research request. Scheduled to ship today, that paper will replace a photocopy in a transportation museum — which seems a very appropriate destination for a Michigan publication.
Motorcycles, motion pictures, mobsters, and murder…those are a few things that interest collectors, and after this week things of which I now know a very little bit more.
Post Script: And, as I was reminded by email, there is a world to observe beyond the “m” words — including last week’s glance at suffrage. -SRW