THE Chinese  would be surprised to hear that Johannes Gutenberg in Germany invented printing approximately 550 years ago. Actually, the art of printing is much older. It was first developed in Eastern Asia, and centuries before Gutenberg’s    birth around 1400 the Chinese knew the system of movable characters". Characters on bones, bronze, ceramic and stone slabs give evidence of the use of writing in China already in the 5^th millennium before Christ. Writing became reproducible in larger quantities when the Chinese succeeded in inventing paper approximately 2,200 years ago. In the beginning paper consisted largely of hemp fibers, then of silk rags or mulberry bark and similarly exotic raw materials. But it worked: Suddenly large writing surfaces were available that could be easily produced.

Newspaper collecting is a relatively new hobby.  In 1953, microfilm came into practical use, and libraries then began filming their paper archives and releasing the bound actual old newspapers that they kept for centuries as live archives.  At first, libraries took the precious actual newspapers and threw them in the dumpsters after filming them (Even the 18th Century newspapers).  Soon, people started to wake up and realize these were important collectables and library workers would take the papers home, or they were put up for sale.