The Birmingham age-herald., 1914-07-05
PRESS CLIPPINGS
 WORTH FORTUNES
London Journalist Insures His Collec- tion--HOw Authors Make Use of
 the Newspaper Clippings

The news, first made public the other day, that a certain well-known London journalist has insured his collection of newspaper cuttings for no less a sum than 93,000 doubtless came as a sur prise to many people says Pearson's Weekly. And, indeed, it Is somewhat difficult for an outsider to understand how a mere tumble of snippets from old journals can be worth any such sum.
 Yet their actual value to their owner
 is probably far in excess of what he has insured them for, for they are his stock in trade, the raw material, so to speak, out of which he manufactures the wares by the sale of which he makes his liveIi- hood.
 The entire collection, the accumula ton of years, numbers some millions of sep arate cuttings relating to practically every conceivable subject and they are all carefully pigeon-holed and indexed. Any trained writer, having such cut ting library at his disposal, could make a good living without stirring beyond the four walls of his study.
 For it must not be supposed that news paper cuttings are only useful for the compiling of newspaper articles. Some of the best novels ever published have been built up from these selfsame ma | terials, notable case in point being Marcus Clarkes For the Term of His
 Natural Life" described by Charles Dickens as ''the nose unforgettable book ever written" Old readers of P. w. will remember that 1t appeared in these pages as serial story some years ago. For years Clarke had been in the | habit of collecting cuttings from news papers and blue books relating to con- vict life in Australia; and one day, while idly glancing through them, the thought suddenly struck him: What a story is enshrined here." He set to work at once, sorting and collecting them, and soon had the satisfaction of seeing the book grow and take form under his eyes-a sort of verbal jig-saw puzzle-ere ever he put his pen to paper. The book, in fact, practically wrote itself, for every incident and every character in the story was taken from real life.
 Many of Charles Reade's most power- ful stories, too. were constructed on precisely similar lines, notably, Put Yourself in His place." and ''It is Never Too Late to Mend." admittedly two of his best works Reade was one of the
 
 that ever lived, devoting regularly sev- eral hours every morning to what, in his case, was at once a hobby and means to an end. Jut before his death he valued his collection at R10,o00. and estimated that 1t contained no fewer than 100000 cuttings relating to about 9SO0OO different subjects Its weight was in excess of one ton.
 Victor Hugo, besides collecting news paper cuttings, made a point of filing for reference all the tradesmen's cir- culars that were delivered at his house By these means he made sure of always having the proper technical phraseology when he wished to introduce shop talk" into any of his stories.
 George Augustus Sala went a step furthur than this even. All was fish that came to his net. Newspaper clip pings, old playbills, quack medicine ad- vertisements, caricatures, prints, broad sheets, tradesmen's circularg, dinner menus-he kept them all. He had, too, a most ingenious and elaborate system of indexing them, so that it never took him more than a minute or SO to turn up any single paragraph or document from