The Intelligencer's Centennial Jubilee

I've been posting separate blogs for PhillyBurbs.com for the past couple weeks. You can check them out at my page there, but I've got some time today so I'm going to re-post a few of them here for you. Because I love you like that.

I spent yesterday oblivious to the fact that it was The Intelligencer's 207th birthday. Sorry, Intell. I'll make it up to you.

This morning there was a present from the History Fairy (which I'll now be calling Ed Levenson; he'll love that) on my desk: a folder with some photocopied memorbilia from The Intelligencer's 100th anniversary (endearingly called a "Centennial Jubilee") in 1904.

July 8, 1904

The Doylestown Daily Intelligencer's minutely detailed article on the event.

There was also a photocopy of an article that ran the day following the jubilee, which was rather long and sort of exhaustingly detailed. My late-20th-century brain just wasn't built for that sort of thing, but this paragraph did make me smile:

Doylestown Daily Intelligencer
July 8, 1904
"While a Philadelphia orchestra furnished music from 7.30 until 8 o'clock, the guests arrived, were welcomed at the door by representatives of the paper, and spent the time socially. One of the interesting features was the exhibition of old files of the paper, which were on a table at the front of the room and carefully examined."

Hooray for history!

And hooray even more so for historical people enjoying things that are even more historical. If that makes any sense.

I'm not precisely sure how the newspaper stored its clippings in 1904. I know that in the 1930s articles were clipped out and pasted into tall, thin books. I used to these books were referred to as "morgues," but after a while learned that a newspaper morgue is actually the entire collection of files, and not a single file itself. I guess a file is just a file.

James Michener's early files

This is how Intelligencer articles were archived in the 1930s.

We haven't used books like that to archive clippings since at least the 1950s, when my librarian predecessors started storing articles folded like origami in frustratingly tiny little envelopes.

Doylestown Cemetery

Around the 1960s, articles were folded and filed away into tiny envelopes.

Since around 2003, The Intelligencer has archived its articles digitally, which is much more convenient for our late-20th-century brains to access and absorb, albeit severly deficient aesthetically. But who knows? Maybe in another hundred years they'll be exciting to someone.