OF RAGS AND READERS
The evolution of headlines and datelines, the role of postmasters, and other facts about the history of newspapers:
NAMEPLATE
The “nameplate” of a newspaper (known as the “masthead” in the United Kingdom) is its logo atop Page 1. It includes the date and place of publication, the volume and number, and the price — sixpence in the case of the Sussex Weekly Advertiser; or, Lewes Journal.
Sometimes it includes a motto, coat of arms or other illustration.
The titles of early newspapers reflected their particular mission.
Advertisers specialized in local advertisements and commercial news like commodity prices.
Gazette is one of the oldest and most popular newspaper names. It can mean an official journal or simply a newspaper. The name comes from the Venetian gazzetta, a coin of small value for which a news sheet sold.
Mercury and Courant (French for running) convey speed — suggesting they are the first to report the news.
Post, Mail and Telegraph refer to the means by which news arrived.
Journal (from Latin via Old French) means daily.
Long, awkward titles like Sussex Weekly Advertiser; or, Lewes Journal were common in 1799. One of the leading newspapers of the American Revolutionary era was Rivington’s New York Gazetteer; or the Connecticut, New Jersey, Hudson River and Quebec Weekly Advertiser.
The title of the Weekly Advertiser names both the county — Sussex — and the town — Lewes — where it is located.
THE LONG “S”
Newspapers and books printed before the 1800s can seem confusing to a modern reader because of the “long ‘s’”. When placed at the beginning or in the middle of a word, the lowercase letter “s” is written as a long “s”. This letter, now obsolete, resembles the letter “f”, except that it lacks the “nub” (crossbar).
PRINTERS AND POSTMASTERS
Given the importance of the mail to newspapers, the local printer and postmaster were often one and the same person in this era. Benjamin Franklin, who made
his fortune as publisher of the Pennsylvania Gazette, became postmaster of Philadelphia in 1737 and was one of two deputy postmasters of North America (including Canada) from 1753 to 1774. In 1775, he became the future nation’s first Postmaster General.
In Montreal, Edward Edwards, who took over the Montreal Gazette in 1795, the year after founder Fleury Mesplet died, had been postmaster since 1786. Edwards thus had easy access to foreign newspapers and was able to prevent his rival Louis Roy, who published a competing version of the Montreal Gazette from 1795 to 1797, from getting his hands on the latest news from abroad.
Edwards’ Montreal Gazette was less controversial than Mesplet’s paper. It simply reprinted official proclamations and advertisements, along with news copied from British and American newspapers.
DATELINE
The dateline is an age-old journalistic term whose purpose has become less obvious in modern times.
It’s a line at the beginning of an article indicating the date and place of writing. In an era when readers learned of events long after they happened, the dateline was essential to indicate how fresh the news was.
As technology speeded up newsgathering, many newspapers started omitting the date from the dateline. Today, the dateline, followed by a long dash, usually serves to identify the
place where the article was written, not the date.
HEADLINE
Headlines running across two or more columns are a common feature of modern newspapers. But in 1799, headings were very basic, like “Stolen or Strayed” above an item on a missing pony.
Often, the only heading is the dateline, like “Paris, December 17,” or the day the news came in the mail, like “Tuesday and Wednesday’s Posts.”
Some articles have no title at all. A column of print can contain several articles on different topics without any titles to break them up.
READERS
Newspapers were often read out loud in coffee houses in the 18th century. That’s because many people — perhaps 40 per cent of men and 50-60 per cent of women in Britain — could not read. Literacy was much lower in Montreal.
Even the largest metropolitan newspapers in Britain had circulations in the low thousands, while print runs for regional weeklies were often in the low hundreds. Lewes had a population of 4,000 in the 1780s, according to Tom Paine: A Political Life by John Keane, while Montreal had about 9,000 residents in 1800.
RAGS
Calling a newspaper a rag should be a compliment, not an insult. Before technological change revolutionized the pulp and paper industry in the late 19th century, paper was made from rags. As a result, most newspapers from the 18th century have survived in much better condition than those printed a century or more later.
COLLECTORS
A single issue of a historic newspaper isn’t worth much unless it completes a series, says Daniel Chouinard, a specialist in historic newspapers at the Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec.
For example, the first four issues of the ancestor of the Montreal Gazette — La Gazette littéraire, founded in 1778 — are missing. He would give his eye teeth to find them.
However, there are other copies of the Sussex Weekly Advertiser from Dec. 30, 1799, so British libraries do not seek it, Chouinard said.
“I would assume that an antiquarian bookseller would ask maybe a few hundred dollars for that issue, which is not that high when you think some fancy books can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars on the market,” he said.
STORAGE
Humidity and light are the two most important factors in storing old newspapers, Chouinard said.
Humidity should be about 45 per cent and the temperature should be between 16 and 20 degrees.
Newspapers are stored in the dark because sunlight triggers an acid reaction that causes the paper to crumble.
Since the Montreal Gazette does not have facilities to store old newspapers, we donated the copy of the Sussex Weekly Advertiser to the BANQ.
UNCERTAIN FUTURE
A newspaper from 1799 can be read today. But will today’s digital content be readable two centuries from now?
That is far from certain, Chouinard says.
“It might be a big challenge in the future,” he said.
Just as you can’t listen to an 8-track recording of Saturday Night Fever without the player, future generations might need an antique computer to read digital content from 2016.
“Will you have to keep the devices? How do you put that from one format into another so that you can read it over time, which is not a problem with paper?” Chouinard asked.
“I can still read the paper just the way it was on the very same day it was published,” he said.
“It hasn’t changed, so there’s some stability in paper. We don’t know exactly what will happen in the digital age.”