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Wednesday, November 12, 2008—The Nation’s Oldest Newspaper™ extends its bemused congratulations and hearty best wishes to the audacious scamps who have temporarily and harmlessly appropriated the New York Times brand, and used it as a platform on which to indulge in some creative, useful, and reality-based re-interpretation of reality. Talk about poetic justice. With its hidebound and blindered interpretation of reality, the hereditary stewards of the alleged “newspaper of record” have been the prime enablers over the past eight years of the Bush maladministration’s vicious and perverse reign. They may or may not face legal prosecution for violation of trademark rights. This is clearly a …

Read moreBest News Yet

Sunday, November 9, 2008—We’re a couple of days late posting this pdf file (3.7 MB) of our Volume 253, No. 2, published on paper here in the 28th most historic place on Earth on October 17. Blame our uppityness—or our sloth—for the delay. You can’t go wrong. This was our final paper before the election. Ordinarily, we would have published a paper on October 31, and then again on November 14. That schedule would have put us on a collision course with Thanksgiving and Christmas, though. We avoided that by putting off our schedule by one week. In this issue, we tried to wrap our …

Read moreOur Final Pre-Election Paper

Thursday, November 6, 2008—We’re fairly well occupied with putting together tomorrow’s edition of the paper, but we couldn’t resist posting this updated version of There’s No One As Irish as Barack Obama, by Hardy Drew and the Nancy Boys, in honor of the occasion: Our thanks go to Bob Vincent for alerting us to this.

Saturday, October 25, 2008—Jack Williams, of Effingham, New Hampshire, demonstrated his wooden common press at Strawbery Banke in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on Friday, October 24, 2008. The demonstration was part of the New Hampshire Writers’ Project’s Portsmouth Literary Festival. Jack built the press himself, from plans drawn by Clinton Sisson, of the Smithsonian Institute. Sisson’s plans were drawn up from careful measurements taken from a press in the Smithsonian’s collection which was once used by Benjamin Franklin. This is a newer video of the press, with higher resolution and additional detail not present in the earlier version. The man in the introductory clip, wearing a …

Read moreWooden Press Demonstration

Monday, October 20, 2008—As has been our practice for some time now, we’re making available here a pdf file of the paper preceeding the one we just published on paper. Complicated enough? We thought so. We’d also like to note here that we will publish our next paper, not on October 31 as we normally would, but on Friday, November 7. We are making this adjustment to our publishing schedule in order to avoid what would otherwise be head-on collisions with two national holidays: Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008—We are thrilled to announce that on Friday, October 24, at Strawbery Banke, the general public will once again be able to watch this wooden printing press in action. The hand-made press, built by John. A. “Jack” Williams, of Effingham, is virtually identical to the one used by Daniel Fowle during the first thirty years of this paper’s existence. In fact, the form and operation of printing presses went almost unchanged from the days of Johannes Gutenbererg, until the introduction of iron presses in the early 1800’s. From 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Jack will be inking the type, putting paper on …

Read moreSee the Wooden Press in Action!