Discovered: Rare 1774 newspaper in a New Jersey Goodwill

Mike Storms was walking among the crowded shelves of the New Jersey Goodwill facility where he works when something yellow and faded caught his eye. He paused and pulled from the thrift-store jumble a framed sheet of newsprint, dense columns of tiny text topped by a small engraving of a dismembered snake.

The Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser, it read. The date? Dec. 28, 1774.

It had been sitting there for months, ignored or dismissed as a worthless reproduction. But Mr. Storms, a vintage watch collector and self-described “lover of old things,” was intrigued. If it really was an 18th century newspaper, he loved thinking of the craftsmanship that went into hand setting all that type, the clunky screw press that would have produced it, one inky broadsheet at a time.

And the three holes he saw punched in the center fold made him think the paper had once been bound with other editions, something not likely with a cheap copy.

“I went to my boss and said, ‘Look, do you mind if I research this a little more?’,” Mr. Storms said.

The boss said yes and was glad she did. It took Mr. Storms only a few minutes of Googling “Unite or Die masthead” to learn that such an edition of the paper, if genuine, could fetch upwards of $18,000 on the collector’s market. And it took only a few weeks to confirm that Goodwill had indeed lucked into one of only four known existing copies of that day’s edition of the paper, still perfectly readable 244 years after it rolled — or rather, was peeled — off the press.

“The fact that it survived is just amazing” said Mr. Storms.

The most dangerous stretch of its quarter-millennium existence, Mr. Storms said, may have been its months in Goodwill hands. The charity handles thousands of tons of donated merchandise, he noted, but with something less than museum care. There’s a good chance the piece spent some time in a collection bin under garbage bags filled with old shoes and broken bikes.

How and when the paper — which is bound on both sides by glass — arrived at a Goodwill collection point in Woodbury, N.J., is unknown. But rather than going straight out to the sales floor, a sorter must have tossed it onto the pile of items considered too weird or too valuable for the standard thrift shop shopper.

Those objects are trucked to a Goodwill office in Bellmawr, just over the river from Philadelphia, where the best of the junk is put up for sale on shopgoodwill.com, the eBay wing of the nonprofit. It’s mostly an inventory of old jewelry, dubious paintings and played out trumpets. But there are treasures, too.

“We just sold some Native American harvest baskets for about $9,000,” said e-commerce manager Heather Randall. “The lady gave them to a museum.”

The “Unite or Die” paper hadn’t made the cut until Mr. Storms took up its case. He immediately contacted Timothy Hughes, a rare newspaper dealer in Williamsport, Pa., who has two editions of the same paper for sale, for $15,500 and $18,500 respectively. He was surprised to realize that the Goodwill was on to something similar.

“We get a lot of calls about historic newspapers, and I’m usually skeptical,” Mr. Hughes said. “I’ve been dealing newspapers for 42 years, and we’ve probably had five or six pop up with that particular snake engraving. But this was the real thing.”