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https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-double-fold

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[This is the sixth of many finalists in the book review contest. It\\u2019s not by me - it\\u2019s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I\\u2019ll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you\\u2019ve read all of them, I\\u2019ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check out\\xa0point 3 here\\xa0for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA]

If you enter a major research library in the US today and request to see a century-old issue of a major American newspaper, such as\\xa0Chicago Tribune,\\xa0The Wall Street Journal, or major-but-defunct newspapers such as the New York \\u201cWorld,\\u201d odds are that you will be directed to a computer or a microfilm reader. There, you\\u2019ll get to see black-and-white images of the desired issue, with individual numbers of the newspaper often missing and much of the text, let alone pictures, barely decipherable.

The libraries in question mostly once had bound issues of these newspapers, but between the 1950s and the 1990s, one after another, they ditched the originals in favor of expensive microfilmed copies of inferior quality. They continued doing this even while the originals became perilously rare; the newspapers themselves were mostly trashed, or occasionally sold to dealers who cut them up and dispersed them. As a consequence, many of these publications are now rarer than the Gutenberg Bible, and some 19th and 20th century newspapers have ceased to exist in a physical copy anywhere in the world.