Perhaps the most experiential collectible?

February 20, 2026 by  
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My collecting gene kicked in at an early age. At some point when in elementary school I discovered that really old coins could be purchased—wow! I found owning a penny from 50 years before I was born intriguing and fascinating, even though others considered it nothing more than curious. They just didn’t get it.

I pursued the coin-collecting hobby for many years; heck, I still have many I purchased 60 years ago. But I must admit, collecting old coins is certainly not very experiential. There’s a date and a dead guy’s image on the front, and some curious symbol or building on the back. That’s about it. You can “experience” an old coin in about 3.5 seconds.

Some 50 years ago I discovered an old newspaper from 1827 at a flea market priced at $3. It was an epiphanal moment for my collecting passion. Here was something very old that could be enjoyed for more than 3.5 seconds. It was just a four-page newspaper but it must have taken at least 20 minutes to “experience” from beginning to end. News reports, advertisements, curious notes about travel, legal notices, criminal reports—all of it was so different from my experience I was living.

As I relegated my coin collection to a dresser drawer, I pursued more old newspapers from wherever I could find them. Each was a different experience from a different era. Not only were the news reports from the Civil War different from the Revolutionary War, & different from the 1920’s, but the advertisements, notices, and other quaint tidbits were much different as well.

At times I found inconspicuous, benign reports of no historical consequence to be more interesting than the news report which prompted the purchase. A benign listing of the West Point admissions for 1839 which included Ulysses S. Grant can be a fascinating find. After all, who cared about the name Ulysses S. Grant in 1839? Or what about discovering a small classified ad for “Lincoln and Herndon, Attorneys & Counsellors At Law” in an 1857 Illinois newspaper. Did I really care anymore about the report of political troubles in Kansas, the reason for which I purchased the newspaper?

And the capability of discovering intriguing reports—thanks to the internet–adds so much more dimension to early newspapers. It is common to read of fugitive slave reports which include the names of the slave & its owner, neither of which might mean anything to anyone. But a quick check on the internet for “Shadrach Minkins” unveils a fascinating and notable drama on the struggles & horrors of this runaway slave in 1850, greatly enriching the innocuous report by allowing the reader to experience a piece of American history that otherwise would have been easy to pass over.

This is what differentiates old newspapers from the rest of the collectible world. It is dramatically more experiential. What other collectible requires a half hour to fully experience? Stamps? Crocks? Matchbook covers? Furniture? Ink wells? Certainly not.

With an old newspaper, whether it be a $500 issue from the colonial era or an $8 newspaper from 1868, one gets far more than the report that prompted the purchase. Every early newspaper opens up an entire world of experiences just waiting to be discovered.

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One Response to “Perhaps the most experiential collectible?”

  1. Frank Caserta on March 3rd, 2026 1:08 am

    You make an excellent point, Tim–one that has crossed my mind many times over the years. Like you, I started out collecting coins as a boy. I particularly liked the interesting and artistic designs that preceded the 20th century’s turn to less creative presidential profiles. However, the collecting emphasis always seemed to revolve around finding a sample that was different by just one or two digits in a date, or by a tiny single-letter mint mark. If you know what a 1921 Lincoln penny looks like, you know exactly what a 1909-S VDB Lincoln cent should look like–even if you never obtain one. Year after year–often for decades–many coins never changed design at all.
    Two newspapers, on the other hand, printed just a day or a few days apart, typically have radically different content and may share only some advertisements in common. I usually learn something interesting from every newspaper I peruse. Studying them often stimulates me to go online and research various topics that I might not have thought about otherwise. With old newspapers, you can learn about historical events, the development of our language, customs, politics, and culture, the evolution of journalism, advertising, printing technology and image formation (from intricate engravings to beautiful rotogravure images to more modern image reproduction), and so forth. I have been moved to gain some knowledge about all of these subjects over my years of collecting old newspapers and the educational experience of encountering them in primary sources is priceless. You not only see how things have changed over the centuries but also gain a fascinating–and often surprising–sense of what truly NEVER changes with time in the human experience.
    As you state, collecting newspapers is “dramatically more experiential” than many other hobbies. I could not agree more!

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