Rare Books and Collectibles

History of Newspapers

The first forerunners of newspapers were produced in Renaissance Europe with privately circulated newsletters that passed along information to merchants concerning politics, economics, and ‘human interest’ features. In the late 1400s Germany produced the first printed news pamphlets or broadsides, usually with highly sensationalised content. The first successfully published news pamphlets in the English-speaking world was The Weekly Newes in 1622. The first of these pamphlets were actually only produced when a significant event occurred.

The 1640s and 1650s produced a variety of news reports in a newsbook format, leading up to the first true newspaper in 1666 – the London Gazette. This was the only officially sanctioned newspaper for almost a generation, although there were many periodical titles in print by the end of the century.

Today newspapers publish a wide variety of material from news to politics, economics and business, sport, art and entertainment, opinion articles and letters, advertising, weather forecast, classified ads, reviews, comics and puzzles. There are also many different types of newspapers, from those geographically defined (such as The Australian) to those targeted at a specific audience, whether business or sports or a specific language.

Newspaper Collections

Newspapers are collected for many different reasons. Some people collect newspapers that were printed on the day of their child’s birth to give to them on the day they become adults. It is a nostalgic practice that shows the son or daughter what was going on in the world on the day they were born.

Another form of newspaper collecting is when a newspaper is kept for it report on a very significant event, whether a huge earthquake, a royal wedding or a stock market crash. By collecting newspapers reporting events of significant historical impact, collectors are essentially compiling a record of history as it happens. As an anonymous author wrote: “Journalists write the first draft of history”. A significant collector of newspapers are libraries, where every issue of the region’s main newspapers is collected and often stored on microfilm for historical and research purposes.