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.
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.
On one of the display areas leading to the archive, Caren has hung a collection of early milestones in journalism. There is a 1519 woodcut illustrated broadside on the death of Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian. Its text, written in three languages, was intended for the international market. The only other known copy of the account resides in a museum. There is also what can only be described as a short introduction to pictorial journalism. It is a hand colored 1588 German illustrated broadsheet depicting the defeat of the Spanish Armada, issued by the Hogenberg family on the days or within weeks that the events occurred. It is just one of a bound run of broadsides from 1570 to 1610 that Caren owns.
As Caren explained, Hogenberg is the father of pictorial journalism, the creator of illustrated journals for an illiterate population. As such, the focus is on the graphic. The text below is rhyming. These broadsheets were available from street hawkers with satchels or the local printer’s bookstores. By the time the first formal English language newspaper was printed and got its name as such, 147 years had elapsed.
Admittedly, Caren hedges a bit when talking about firsts. “Anytime you ask what a first is, there are six answers. Everything was an evolution&⁴here is nothing new under the sun,” he said. However, The Oxford Gazette , printed in Oxford, England, and being a single sheet printed on both sides and carrying a date, gave genesis to the word “newspaper.” Caren said, “They printed the first 23 issues as The Oxford Gazette . When the Great Plague in London abated and the king and his court moved back to London from Oxford where they had sought safety, the title was changed to The London Gazette .” It can be seen in the Newseum as well as in the Caren Archive.
After selling a substantial portion of his collection to the Newseum, Caren made it a point to recollect, sometimes even upgrading, many of those items. An edition of The London Gazette featuring news of the Great Fire of London is one such recent reacquisition. “It is the first important event in the first English language newspaper,” he said.
Also in Caren’s gallery is a Louis XIV wall almanac from 1710. It is hand painted, intended to last only a year, not the centuries it has endured. There is also the first picture of Custer’s Last Stand as it appeared in the New York Daily Graphic. It is all, as Caren points out, “history as it unfolds on paper.”
Recalling one of his first acquisitions, Caren said, “I started with my allowance; [I am] self-made.” When he was 12, one of his first objects of desire was a Seventeenth Century paper advertised in a catalog. The price was $7.50 and beyond his means. The fledgling collector settled for an Eighteenth Century paper costing $4.95. At that time, he was not collecting to acquire news of great events. It was more the age of the paper that held his interest.
“In those days, you collected in isolation. It was hard to find kindred spirits. The first thing I found was Hobbies magazine. It ran classified ads by people who dealt in newspapers.” Much of his early knowledge was gained at the library. He frequented flea markets and trade shows. Then he joined a newspaper club. That led to him becoming the first president of the Newspaper Collectors Society of America, a now-defunct organization.
He is currently a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, the American Antiquarian Society and the former director of the Ephemera Society.
Caren does not, however, hold with the notion that the umbrella title of “ephemera” does justice to this area of collecting. “It is so much meatier, historically. Historical collectibles is a term I use sometimes.”
Once Caren discovered that he could make money selling his papers at trade shows, he worked toward obtaining a business degree from the University of Maryland. His first job was in a London gallery specializing in rare newspapers. Laughing, he said that his only other kind of day job was a short-lived stint in the restaurant business. He hated it and got even with the boss, he jokes, by marrying her.
If he has an inventory of half a million pieces †and Caren is not counting †he has sold at least as many. Not only is the “crème de la crème” of the collection he had seven years ago the basis for the dedicated space in the Newseum known as the “Story of News,” he has also contributed to other museum collections. One example is the early comic book collection in Steve Geppi’s Entertainment Museum in Baltimore, Md. As seen through the eyes of the expert, there are, in addition to the readily acknowledged Golden Age, also Silver and Classic Ages of comics categories. There is the Pioneer Age, an area Caren developed and authors a chapter on in the annual Overstreet Comic Guide .
The Pioneer Age can be traced back to the Hogenberg illustrated broadsheets. Unlike later comics, they were neither funny nor filled with superheroes. “Comics in the Sixteenth Century were narratives in strip format. Really narratives of the events taking place.” An example is the story of a group of London conspirators who were captured, led to a place of execution, dismembered and their heads displayed on spikes.
Among Caren’s contributions to the Entertainment Museum is the famous Benjamin Franklin graphic of a snake in pieces that played on the superstition that a snake cut up would regenerate and come back to life. Underscored by the line “Join or Die,” the cartoon was used as a rallying cry to unify the colonists against the French during the French and Indian War. At the time Caren owned this piece, it was the only known copy in private hands.
He also has a 1617 newsbook about Jamestown Colony, published by Hulsius in Germany. It is 76 pages long and contains four illustrated plates and a folding John Smith map of New England. Another rare item is a 1608 manuscript London newsletter with news of a cargo of gold being transported from Jamestown Colony. A man writes to a peer, “There came lately from Virginia a ship and lyth before Greenwich laden with gold ore but being tried by the refiners, alas was scarce worth the loading.” Turns out, the cargo was fool’s gold.
If there is one item that has evaded Caren’s quest to date, it is the Columbus Letter , a newsbook printed on the continent and available in a variety of editions that announces Columbus’s discovery of America. Though Caren has had opportunities to obtain various examples, he has yet to find the one that meets his strict standards in regard to condition.
When he is ready for the newsbook, Caren believes the right edition will come his way. “I do believe that you develop some kind of magnetism for things. I’ve proven it to myself and my colleagues over and over again †where I’ll get something in my head and it comes to me rather quickly.”
The last item he dared himself to find was a 1765 Stamp Act protest edition of the Pennsylvania Journal printed by Thomas Bradford. This tombstone edition †the final edition of a paper †is Americana at its best. Bradford found it preferable to shut the paper down rather than comply with the Stamp Act, but not before mocking the legislation with a brazen black bordered front-page bearing a skull and crossbones on the masthead and a mock skull and crossbones stamp in the bottom of the final edition.
Whether or not Caren has the force on his side is debatable. What is clear is that Caren is a force within the collecting field of historical collectibles.
Caren is sole proprietor of the Caren Archives; a vendor on the New York Times Bookstore; chief executive officer of RetroGraphics Publishing, a New Jersey firm that creates and sells reprints and framed memorabilia by mail order; a principal in Stephen A. Goldman Historical Newspapers; and author of ten books relating to historical collectibles.
The Newseum is at Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth Street, NW, Washington, D.C. For information, 888-639-7386 or www.newseum.org . Eric Caren can be emailed at eccaren@prodigy.net .
