PERISHING HISTORY.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 18924, 12 February 1927, Page 13

PERISHING HISTORY.

■ ♦ RAG PAPER EDITION OF THE "NEW YORK TIMES." The announcement by tlio "New York Times" that it was to begin on New Year's Day printing a limited edition on rag- paper elicited much and varied comment. Librarians and historical students have been particularly eager in welcoming the project. Everybody who has bound files of newspapers to keep or to consult knows how soon wood pulp papor begins to turn yellow and disintegrate. A periodical 200 years old printed on paper made from cotton fibre looks fresher and is easier to handle and read than a rowspaper page only ten or twelve years old. Printing has been called "the art preservative of all arts," but to be that it certainly has to preserve itself. What the "Times" proposes is an edition, like that of the London "Times," which can bo bound up in volumes and kept for referonce with the certainty that they will be intact and legible for a hundred years. It may be thought unnecessary to print on rag paper all the pages of the "Times" every day, especially all the parts and sections of the Sunday edition. What possible interest will the classified advertisements have a century and a half from now? Who will then want to look over the obituaries or study the rents of buildings and apartments? Some will hastily conclude that all of this matter may bo omitted from the pages intended to be a permanent record. But that is a mistaken view. No one can tell what value the future historian may find in unconsidered trifles of the kind mentioned. In his efforts to reconstruct tho past, material of this sort may be just what he wants to round out and complete his picture. Not long ago an English antiquarian writer who had laboriously been digging up small details in regard to life at Oxford in 1626 remarked on the great benefit which anybody living to-day could confer on the historians of 2126. It could be done by taking a large blank book and for one" solid year writing down day by day every incident of life as it arose. " Railway fares, the price of bread, the cost of a suit of clothes, the style of hats worn, tho popular hooks arid magazines, the rewards of writers, the pay of cooks and chambermaids—everything of that apparently trifling kind would be absolutely priceless to the historical writer 200 years from now if he could put his hand upon such a complete record safely kept in tho British Museum. It is something on thi3 order which it is hoped to achieve.