MILLIONS OF NEWSPAPERS

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLVII, Issue 8, 7 December 1926, Page 11

MILLIONS OF NEWSPAPERS

BRITISH MUSEUM FILES. , THE STOREROOM AT HENDON. LONDON, Oct. 9. Hendon, just outside of London, is the home of the world’s' greatest storehouse of newspapers and “poll books” —those ancient lists, of voters which rich American tourists turn over 'so feverishly in quest of their English origin. Hendon houses, indeed, more newspapers than can be fpund anywhere else in the British Isles. Newspapers have been pouring into Hendon by the ton for more than twenty years. They are stored in vast fireproof rooms. Now and again they are taken down and sent away to bo devoured by som<s assiduous reader, but the great bulk of them will never be read again. They are being looked after merely because somebody may walk into the British Museum one morning and ask the clerk for a copy of the “Pudsey-on-the-Puddle Gazette” of the second week in January, ,in the year 1752. London’s profit; lmmA for T»o«rc?_

papers of, the past is in Colindale road, where repose millions on millions of newspapers—news-sheets from every remote village and hamlet in the kingdom. Once on a time R copy of every newspaper published in the British Isles was kept in the British Museum. The authorities, however, found themselves at last unable to keep pace with the ever-rising flood of newspapers, so they set about making another little mu-

seum, which they modestly christened ) “The Repository.” Now “The Repository” is nearly full. It will have to stretch its elastic walls still more before many months go by if Hendon is to remain the world’s greatest newspaper store. All the newspapers that go to Hendon spend a few months’ probation in -the archives of the British Museum itself. They are then sent to the binders, w’here they are neatly and securely bound. They are returned to the Museum and later sent out to Hendon. Once every week the Museum’s motor

van journeys out to Hendon and re- , turns loaded with old newspapers from ; ‘ ‘The Repository’ ’ —these are the periodicals which Museum readers have asked for. The volumes when finished with are returned to Hendon ■ London newspapers, curiously enough, never leave London. They are all kept in the Museum itself. The old poll books dato back to remote times. They are small, compact volumes, different, indeed, from the heavy and cumbersome lists of voters of the present day. Most of the people whoso names appear in the ■ old poll books were people of importance in those days—freeholders of land, for instance.