Historic Newspapers

Historic newspapers are simply newspapers from the past that have been carefully preserved and kept in an archive. They are a piece of living history from the recent past. You might say that they are "antiques".

These old newspapers used to be stored in libraries, universities and central government departments. Over time the space taken up by these archives of old newspapers obviously increased and the institutions faced a dilemma. They decided to micro fiche their archives of newspapers and sell the actual newspapers to free up the space. They did this during the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies.

This makes a lot of sense when you think of it. To the universities and libraries, it is the information contained within the newspapers that they need, not the physical newspapers themselves. In fact it is probably more useful to store the information in the form of micro fiche's rather than paper. Apart from the huge space requirements, paper is more likely to get damaged and more difficult to manage than micro fiche.

So what happened to the original paper copies of these newspapers? An imaginative UK gift company bought up a huge amount of them, seven million newspapers in fact. The company thought that they would make great presents for birthdays and anniversaries. A lot of people love the idea of receiving a newspaper that was printed on the day that they were born or got married.

Personalised gifts have become very popular in recent years but I think that historic newspapers are a bit more special than most personalised gifts. You are getting an original piece of history rather than a manufactured item that has your name or photo on it. It was "born" on the same day that you were.

There is a large selection of these newspapers available but some dates are getting rare. There is a finite amount of these historic newspapers so when somebody buys the last copy of a newspaper for a particular date, it is no longer available.

You can check to see what dates are available for the historic newspapers here.