News Gets New Life When Exhumed From the Morgue

Jeff Roth, manager of The New York Times archives, shares some history and explains how past Times material was repurposed for a recent obituary.

Two levels below ground at 230 West 41st Street next to The New York Times offices, Jeff Roth manages more than 100 years of Times archive materials known as the morgue. With 20 years of experience and deep knowledge of Times history, Jeff finds information collected by the paper that is often long forgotten.

He has shared some of the morgue’s history with Insider.

What is it exactly?

There are three collections: the news clippings, the pictures library and portions of The Times’s large book and periodicals library. The news clippings are the original morgue.

The managing editor Carr Van Anda and two young copy boys, John Becan and Tommy Bracken, began this formidable venture in 1907. For the next several decades Becan and Bracken oversaw this massive kingdom. A staff that at some points consisted of dozens of people (much reduced today) worked in three shifts (till 3 a.m.), clipping from 36 copies of The Times and 28 other publications by name and subject.

The morgue is still active, though clipping from our paper ended in the early 1990s. We still clip, but from publications not generally accessible online.

Describe the contents.

There are hundreds of heavy-gauge steel cabinets, the same ones we’ve had since the 1930s, that contain thousands of drawers, millions of index cards and tens of millions of clippings dating from the 1870s.

There is a trove of odd treasures; files including stories “killed” after the first edition, press releases, brochures and handwritten notes of praise (few) or complaints (many). In Irving Berlin’s file, we have a personal note scolding us for continuing to use his old songwriting firm’s name in our stories.

How was the clipping process done?

Scissors? No, too slow; we tore.

And the photos?

The photos in the picture collection date from around 1905 and at some juncture, came to reside with the clippings morgue. We have an estimated 10 million photos, drawings and prints coded, captioned and filed away. Again, hundreds of cabinets, thousands of drawers and, of course, hundreds of thousands of pounds of pictures. The cabinets are weighted so heavily that the rolling shelves securing them are anchored by steel I-beams.

Literally every day, some extraordinary picture is found. Once, we discovered, in the photo contact sheets for the Woodstock Music Festival, that there are about six images of the guitarist Jimi Hendrix playing. No one noticed because he was noted as “Jim Hendricks, guitarist.”

In the folder “Kansas, Droughts” we found a very ordinary picture from 1934 of a trough delivering water to thirsty trees in Wichita. It was shot by one of the 20th century’s giants of photography, W. Eugene Smith, while he was still in high school, living with his folks in Wichita. It’s his first published photo. And it’s probably the only copy in existence.

What’s in the library?

The New York Times Library dates from the paper’s beginnings in 1851. It’s still the largest of any media company in the world. Tens of thousands of books, magazines and brochures on any topic. “The History of Hair,” by Ann Charles and Roger DeAnfrasio; a history of standard time; technical manuals for atomic reactors; and very detailed notes on all storm surges in New York Harbor from 1823 on are all there. The point is they are there when needed.

About 50,000 pounds of books and magazines from our library sit in the morgue, and this is the overflow. The main collection is in the basement at The Times. Need to know the noted deaths for 1861? Check our “Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of Annual Events” for that year.

Are you digitizing?

Digitizing the clips? No, it’s too labor intensive. Dry, fragile clips must be sprayed with water (an old morgue trick — not approved by museums), then the folds relax for reading and copying. It could be done, but it would take a very long time.

Digitizing 10 million pictures? We do it a little at a time — again, a travail. It requires scanning the fronts and backs of each picture for the captions and credits. That information then has to be typed in by a human who can decipher all the notations. Maybe half of 1 percent has been scanned into our server.

What is your all-time greatest surprise?

A story about the Collyer brothers, two reclusive hoarders who lived in Harlem, from 1938 that was killed after the first edition went to print. Two years later a story about them ran that would appear to be the first. Only the late city edition was indexed and microfilmed, so in the digital database, the 1938 story does not exist. Probably the only copy of the story is in Homer and Langley Collyer’s clip folder.

What do you like most about your job?

The serendipity of opening up any drawer and finding something forgotten but now revealed.