The Traveler… death comes to Teddy…

July 15, 2019 by · Leave a Comment 
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Back in January I traveled to Norwich, New York via the Chenango Telegraph of January 7, 1919, where I found a three line headline “Col. Theodore Roosevelt Is Dead At His Home at Sagamore Hill.”  “The news that Col. Theodore Roosevelt is dead was received at this office at 5:30 o’clock Monday morning… The ex-president died at his home at Sagamore Hill at 4 o’clock this morning…”

Besides his presidency, Teddy is probably most known for his Rough-Riders in the Spanish-American War while serving in Cuba.

~The Traveler

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Filed under: Death Reports, The 20th & 21st Centuries, The Hobby
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Great Headlines Speak For Themselves… Black Dahlia found…

July 11, 2019 by · Leave a Comment 
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The best headlines need no commentary. Such is the case with THE BOSTON POST, Massachusetts, January 17, 1947:  “FORMER MEDFORD GIRL FOUND SLAIN“

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The Traveler… new wheels to get around…

July 9, 2019 by · Leave a Comment 
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Nearly a year ago I journeyed to New York City by the means of the Scientific American, dated August 19, 1868, where I found the “Hanlon’s Patent Improved Velocipede”. “Within a few months the vehicle known as the velocipede has received an unusual degree of attention, especially in Paris, it having become in that city a very fashionable and favorite means of locomotion. To be sure the rider ‘works his passage,’ but the labor is less than that of walking, the time required to traverse a certain distance is not so much, while the exercise of the muscles is an healthful and invigorating. A few years ago, these vehicles were used merely as playthings for children, and it is only lately that their capabilities have been understood and acknowledged. Practice with these machines have been carried so far that offers of competitive trials of speed between them and horses on the race course have been made…”

I’m glad that they don’t make them that way any longer!

~The Traveler

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I’m New Here: Weeks Twenty & Twenty-One…

July 4, 2019 by · Leave a Comment 
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It’s hard to put into words all I learned last week, other than conclude (again) I work in an amazing place. Distinct events blurred together as we completed the regular tasks of a pre-catalog release week, simultaneous with the receipt of eleven pallets of a new title.
As I know the least, I am the least helpful in this bulk intake process. Everyone else has done it before – making space where none seems apparent. So I stayed out of the way, fielding phone, email and web orders to the best of my ability.
This week, however, marks the Fourth of the July, and I took the opportunity to look at some surrounding details of 1776 through the real time lens of reported news.

The Sons of Liberty met under the Liberty Tree. It’s not an American fable; I read the notice calling for attendance and providing an alternate location in case of overflowing turnout. People staked fortune and life to sign the Declaration of Independence, and Philadelphia papers published their names alongside that document. Paul Revere was a working man who bought advertisements in The Massachusetts Centinel to draw more customers into his silver shop. Somehow, the risk of this bid for colonial freedom becomes more meaningful as I consider the sacrificial participation required from everyday people who had plenty to occupy them in their own private lives. Regular folks became significant because they stepped up when there was every reason to keep their heads down.
Today I am thinking about the farmers and shopkeepers, the printers and the writers who looked beyond immediate concerns to take a stand for the implications on centuries to come. Surely these are some for whom the words resounded, “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary…”  I won’t pontificate aloud, but there are so many contrasts to the perspective I readily adopt within my plush and easy American life.

Fresh perspective on the human story feeds the impulse: the more I find out, the more I want to know.  But the disconcerting truth is that the more I search, the more versions I find.  The best course of action just might be to head back into the annals and read it for myself…

 

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Announcing: Catalog #284 (for July, 2019) is now available…

July 2, 2019 by · Leave a Comment 
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http://images.rarenewspapers.com.s3.amazonaws.com/ebayimgs/Webs/Catalog-Rare-Newspapers.jpg

Catalog 284 (for July) is now available. This latest offering of authentic newspapers is comprised of nearly 300 new items, a selection which includes: a Pennsylvania Journal with the segmented snake cartoon, a Williamsburg (VA) newspaper on the Gunpowder Plot, Lincoln’s assassination (in a Washington, D.C. newspaper), the famous Honolulu Star Bulletin reporting the Pearl Harbor attack, the capture of Ethan Allen, an issue with the “Beardless” Lincoln print on the front page, and more.

 

The following links are designed to help you explore this latest edition of our catalog:

 

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.)

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Filed under: Announcements, Catalog Release Announcements, Civil War, Collecting Newspapers, Colonial, Confederate, Death Reports, Great Headlines, Newspaper Collecting Ideas, Noteworthy Issues, Old West Era, Post Civil War, Pre Civil War, Revolutionary War, Sports, The 1500's, The 1500's - 1700's, The 1600's, The 1700's, The 19th Century, The 20th & 21st Centuries, The Hobby, The War of 1812, Yankee
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Two hours before disaster… Food for thought!

July 1, 2019 by · Leave a Comment 
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What were you doing when President John F. Kennedy was shot, when the space shuttle Columbia exploded, or when the World Trade Center’s twin towers were struck by planes? Remembering what one was doing at the exact moment such disasters strike is common. But what about two hours earlier? Disasters rarely come with warnings, and in most cases, those within their physical or emotional path are simply going about yet another day – washing dishes, changing diapers, walking dogs, daydreaming at school, arguing with a friend – going through the motions of life. AND THEN…

Such was the case on May 6, 1937 as depicted in an issue of the New York World Telegram. We’ll let the image shown below do the talking. Every moment of every day is precious. What were you doing two hours before you lost a child… a friend… a spouse… a parent? “Two Hours Earlier!” Just something to think about.

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Snapshot 1885… Early flight (?)

June 28, 2019 by · Leave a Comment 
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The following snapshot comes from The Scientific American, New York, dated May 9, 1885. Thankfully, the wise saw, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,” eventually proved to be true.

 

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Snapshot 1914 – the first warship passes through the Panama Canal…

June 25, 2019 by · 2 Comments 
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The following snapshot comes from the Boston Evening Transcript dated August 18, 1914, which announces the first-ever warship making its way through the Panama Canal. Quite historic.

 

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I’m New Here: Week Nineteen…

June 21, 2019 by · Leave a Comment 
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What do Lizzie Borden and the Galveston Flood (Great Storm, Galveston Hurricane, and any other alternate title) have in common? Of all the things I could focus on this week, those are the two that stuck in my mind, and it wasn’t because of personal fascination. Collectors frequently look for things not readily available, and they request to be put on a “want” list. Sometimes we are waiting for a specific title and we contact them when one is in our possession. Other times they are looking for material related to a certain topic, which takes much more time. Ms. S will always buy things concerning South Carolina, and Mr. G is following threads of a story that spans our nation’s history. So, in every spare moment this week my desk was piled with huge volumes of pulpish papers from the year 1900. I was looking for the details as the story unfolded, and I read each in sequence in close to the way a contemporary of that disaster might have. I didn’t know much, and neither did the newspaper subscribers of the time. They, too, were scouring pages for updates, and recoiling in disgust at some of the pictures and descriptions. I read at least five portions aloud to anyone who would listen, because it seemed such a thing should not be kept to one’s self.
I’m not going to describe the bodies piled, and martial law decreed and then finally lifted. I loved reading the notices for benefits that went on for at least a full month in cities as far away as New York. There was also the funniest story about a pair of children under the age of ten who developed a racket going around posing as bedraggled twin refugees from the city of Galveston. It seems many a kindhearted housewife bathed and fed them before realizing herself to be the victim of a scam.
And Lizzie Borden’s story is not much like the Alfred Hitchcock Presents version I was introduced to in midnight reruns during a childhood sleepover. Most people believed her innocent, according to news reports. The earliest police statements were adamant that there could not have been only one killer at work. There was also a credible confession of guilt by a male neighbor who turned himself in.

Often it is this way; complex pictures emerge as I pull reports to fill requests.
This week I learned to follow the sequence, uncovering a fuller story with each new dateline.  There’s a moral in this aspect of things, if I can only pause long enough to ponder it…

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I’m New Here: Week Eighteen…

June 14, 2019 by · 2 Comments 
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This week I learned to back up my data files with more diligence. I also learned that I shouldn’t boast of finishing a task early, as I am liable to then fall far behind (particularly if I don’t save my work).
Most importantly, I learned that we don’t know what we don’t know, and we can’t learn it until we know something.
As I was immersed in the newspaper coverage of significant dates in American History, I found that my vague idea of the Civil War as being somewhere around 1862 kept me from understanding the significance of Lincoln’s assassination within the timetable of the war of brother-against-brother. The great conflict was in the mopping-up stage; Grant had definitively beaten the Confederate troops. And President Abraham Lincoln, the man who took up the burden of holding together the Union, was shot in a theater where he was out for what was termed by one report as “an evening of respite”.  It’s suddenly more tragic, and those long lines formed by a mourning populace seem so reasonable a response by a shocked nation.

Over the weekend, the relative of a Timothy Hughes Rare and Early Newspapers employee was touring the facility and paused over text running down the right margin of the cover of a small periodical from the 1920’s. “You know who that is,” she asserted. We didn’t. We thought it was an issue about the game of hockey, positing the question whether it would or would not last in the United States.
It turns out the featured author of the issue was one Rose Wilder Lane, the woman who penned the tales told by her mother of pioneering days in what eventually came to be called The Little House on the Prairie series. An accomplished writer and reporter, many of her short stories were published in Harper’s Bazaar and Saturday Evening Post.  When Rose was in her seventies, she traveled to Vietnam in order to provide a female perspective on the war for the readership of Woman’s Day Magazine. And I learned all of this because someone who knew a bit, put together pieces and asked a question.
Juxtaposed with this whole journey following strands of the known into discovery of the unknown, was an overheard discussion about the lack of liberal arts education received by the up-and-coming generation. In an era of information available by voice command, almost everything that can be known is, theoretically, accessible. But how will any of us know the questions to ask if we don’t have a base of knowledge from which to begin?    A narrow foundation must by its very nature constrict the breadth of potential growth.

Anyway, this is a great place for contemplation of deep things.  And, since I lost my first draft, I have the opportunity to contemplate the same subject for the second time.  🙂

By the way, the Liberty Magazines are nifty compilations somewhat in the vein of the later Reader’s Digest, packed with advertisements and helpful hints right beside news of the day.

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