There are a lot of perks to being a highly paid blogger here at CreativePro. There’s the free 802.11N wireless on the corporate Gulfstream G5 jet (those poor suckers at Gawker only have 802.11G on their G4), and the bottomless bowl of custom-colored M&Ms in the spacious lobby right next to the oxygen bar (eat your heart out BoingBoing). But my favorite perk is probably the membership in Newspaperarchive.com.
Newspaperarchive.com has searchable PDF files of over 79 million newspaper pages from 727 cities representing 240 years of publishing. The quality of the images is all over the place, and clearly lots of the older papers are converted from bad microfilm, so some are near unreadable. But the ability to actively search through both the copy and the ads of so many old newspapers is an incredible treat.
Subscriptions to Newspaperarchive.com are not cheap—they start at $24.99 for a 10-day pass, up to $95.88 for a year’s subscription. So you may need an initial excuse of some sort (such as client research) to justify the cost, but once you get started, you’ll get more than enough entertainment value for your money.
As a demonstration, I thought I’d show a few finds from the archives on the subject of type and typesetting. Here is one of the oldest ads I could find for a type foundry, this one from 1840 St. Louis.
I’ve been reading about type-designer Frederick Goudy lately, and so I rummaged around for references to this great American type legend. The milestone events like death notices are interesting, of course, but I find the little stuff even more fascinating. Here’s a social item from The Kingston Daily Freeman in 1926 when Goudy and his bride took a trip to Detroit by car (yes, that was news then).
Sadly, a tragic fire destroyed Goudy’s workshop in 1939. Here’s an item covering that event from the Ironwood Daily Globe in 1939.
But Goudy, who only began designing typefaces when he was 60, didn’t give up and remained productive for many more years. Here’s an article from The Ocean Times Herald of 1940.
And a note from the Stars and Strips in 1945 congratulating Goudy on his 80th birthday. He died two years later.
One of my favorite figures is Ottmar Mergenthaler, inventor of the Linotype machine. Mergenthaler lived in Baltimore and was written about extensively. Here, though, is an ominous mention of his illness in 1899 from the Decatur Review.
Mergenthaler was dead a few months later, as reported here in the Waterloo Daily Companion.
Of course the fun of looking at old newspapers is in the small details and language of the times. Here, in one of the many tributes to Mergenthaler, is a section of text that would prove prophetic for typesetters for generations to come. It references the days of the “tramp” printer or “typos” – traveling printer vagabonds who were essentially made irrelevant by Mergenthaler’s machine.
Not everything in the archives is super-old. Here is a very early reference to the new phenomenon called “desktop publishing” that appeared in the Montgomery Daily Record in 1986.
And also from 1986 a couple of ads for Apple Macintosh publishing systems (only $10,000!) that appeared in the computer section of the Syracuse Herald American.
I highly recommend Newspaperarchive.com, and I guarantee you’ll find yourself lost in a sea of nostalgia very quickly. I’d love to see some of your favorite finds and will gladly compile them for a future blog entry (but no, I won’t share any of my hefty weekly fee with you). To submit your favorites, just click on the Comments icon at the top or bottom of the center column.
Of course, I have the extra pleasure of exploring the archives while jetting across the world eating Navajo-White M&Ms. Someday, somewhere, someone will probably write about the hedonistic excess we bloggers currently enjoy. Perhaps they’ll do some of their research at newspaperarchive.com.
This article was last modified on April 9, 2021
This article was first published on April 11, 2008
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