One of the first books printed in what is now the United States, this 1676 history of The War With the Indians in New England was written by Increase Mather, a teacher at Church of Christ in Boston.
:When the winds of fortune blow, they sometimes pick up bits of old newspaper. If one is lucky enough to latch onto a few, as Eric Caren did, they might find a career in the printed page.
At least that is how the noted newspaper collector remembers the day in 1971 when he explored the grounds of a derelict Brooklyn newspaper archive and discovered a field littered with yesterday's news. Fascinated, Caren did what any 11-year-old boy might do; he snatched as many of the pages as he could carry and raced back to the safety of his bedroom to examine the booty.
Just days before that, friends had brought him sports pages from the same archive. They were dated 1913. It was too early for any mention of his hero, Babe Ruth, but the dedicated young baseball fan found himself in heady waters just the same. He was reading news that had been written as the events developed. It was history exhumed and brought back to life 67 years later. The black and white treasures, printed on two sides, the type interrupted by steel cut engravings, sparked his imagination and inspired a career.
Caren now presides over one of the finest collections of rare newspapers in the world. He is also one of the leading contributors of historic documents to the recently opened Newseum in Washington, D.C.
A collector who can sell off 30,000 of his finest items to the Newseum and not notice much of a dent in quantity or quality cannot avoid paper clutter. So when Caren recently invited
Antiques and The Arts Weekly
to view a portion of the collection stored in one of several warehouses, it was a revelation. Instead of the expected library, neat and orderly, several hundred square feet of space contain mountains of newsprint packed so closely together that only the collector could comfortably navigate the narrow footpaths between them.
One man, so many stories. Eric Caren's sense of history is not limited to only one period. Here, he holds an original of the famous Remarks on the Slave Trade, which graphically dramatized conditions on slave ships. To the right, a headline louder than the shot that killed John Lennon. Behind, a more joyful poster shouts out news of an early air show.
Floor-to-ceiling shelves grunt under the weight of archival boxes labeled by diverse themes and equally diverse decades — 15 boxes on crime, virtually every outlaw and every gangster paper that was published; and then there are the six shelves of rock 'n' roll memorabilia from the 1960s. What wall space is left is jammed with posters and broadsides that scream of war, celebration, disaster and death and airplanes. One gust of wind and there is a near silent avalanche of paper that Caren must adroitly reorganize to avoid a disastrous chain reaction.
Having had experience with other newcomers' reactions to the glut of newspapers, broadsides, magazines, manuscripts and photographs, Caren quickly explained his modus operandi. "I try to get something related to every important event in American and European history, as far back as the Sixteenth Century," he said, pausing and then adding, "And I collect by association. Things float to the top of the pile and then I get into them. Right now, it's Sixteenth through Eighteenth Century American and European broadsides."
Ever since Caren made the discovery in the 1970s that libraries were deaccessioning their collections in favor of microfiche and he could have as many papers and bound volumes as he could load into a truck, his quest has not abated. It has only grown more refined; the items more desirable. While Caren still buys large collections, culls what he wants and sells the rest, he much prefers to deal in rarities.
