As one of the leading authorities on rare and historic newspapers, we’ve been featured in the news ourselves. Here are a few snippets of our coverage:


Hold the front page… and the back and inside ones too
Financial Times
July 27 2007

Great historic events make for highly collectable newspapers: the Great Fire of London, the Battle of Culloden, the battles of Waterloo and Trafalgar, the major battles of the American Civil War.

“The same applies to papers carrying reports about famous people such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln,” says Hughes. “There’s also a worldwide interest in the Wild West and especially for outlaws such as Jesse James and Billy the Kid. All that has been much romanticised by the film industry, in turn generating interest in the newspapers which relate to it.” [full article]


Millions of pages of history
Sun Gazette
July 27, 2008

“Particularly because of the prices, people think these aren’t genuine,” he said. The sturdy fiber used to make newspapers before 1880 can throw customers off, he added. “When they buy a newspapers and they receive it and they hold it and feel a newspaper that is 200 years old, they say it couldn’t be real … Because it’s relatively white and not brown and yellow and fragile,” he said. Such high quality papers do not need to be handled with kid-gloves, Hughes said. “There was a lot of cotton and linen in the newspapers (before 1880). You can open it up, you can turn the page, crease it and fold it. It holds up extremely well.” More recent paper can yellow and become brittle with sunlight and warm temperatures. “You can’t resurrect a newspaper, that’s the problem,” Hughes said of newspapers found in family attics. He encourages people to purchase newspapers in “as good of condition as you can” and to use protective folders. [full article]


Collecting Newspapers
Fine Books & Collections – The Blog
April 25, 2008

Hughes is definitely the leading dealer in his field and has a great many newspapers in inventory. His business turns out to be a family affair that has taken over what used to be his father’s machine shop. This video shows it to be ephemera dealing on fork-lift and heavy-lift scale.


Extra! Extra! Pennsylvania’s Tim Hughes Offers Old and Rare Newspapers for Sale
American Journalism

“Tim [Hughes] is the best out there in the profession of putting out newspapers,” according to a client. “He has some of the best material in the country.”


Collecting Vintage Newspapers
Pop Culture Collecting

“As with any collectible, the thing that determines a piece’s value is its scarcity,” says Hughes, who operates one of the country’s largest dealerships of rare and vintage newspapers. “We deal with a wide range of people from all over the world. From those who, like me, are simply intrigued by old newspapers, to educators, authors and historians who use them for reference.”


Headlines Make History and Career
The Philadelphia Inquirer

“It’s walking through time,” [Tim Hughes] said. “If you can’t go back and relive it, you can have in your hand the actual newspaper that someone 150 years ago read as they read about Gettysburg, Lexington and Concord, the Declaration of Independence.”


The Actapublicurist – An Investor in America’s Past
The Robb Report
Authored by Tim Hughes

What hobby can claim more redeeming historical relevance than the field of the actapublicurist – the newspaper collector? A newspaper is the lifeblood of history. It is drama in the making. Amid today’s flight to collect everything imaginable, why has the newspaper been so overlooked? Its day as a serious collectible is perhaps beginning. There is a treasure – and an awakening world – being discovered.