Anyone into collecting newspaper clippings? (contains scans)

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It’s funny how you consciously think of some things, and of others not at all. When asked about my obsessions, I totally forgot to mention that I’ve been collecting newspaper clippings continuously since the age of ten! Even though I’ve regularly weeded out my archive, I must have over four thousand clippings, all with the date and source noted in the margin and sorted according to subject matter. Here are some examples from 1976 to 2002 (click to enlarge):

I used to collect the funny pages, but I realized my box was overflowing and I hadn't read any of them, so I gave it up.

I also used to clip out photos I liked from National Geographic when I was younger.

The reason I began to collect press clippings was that I wanted to become a novelist, and I read somewhere that Jules Verne - my favourite writer at the time - had compiled a huge archive of newspaper clippings that he based his stories around. Today, with the Internet available as information source, such an exercise seems kind of pointless, but I’ve kept a lot of the clippings because reading them feels like travelling in a time machine, especially if you’ve lived through those times. I picked these particular articles to scan because they touched on several subjects recently mentioned on WP: the planet Mars, Star Wars, Pope John Paul I, Rocky, Douglas Adams, River Phoenix... even a mummy, though it’s only a mummified fly.

There are relatively few of the later ones partly because most of them are in German, but also because they mostly deal with depressing subject matters such as school shootings, the bombing of Belgrad or the War on Terror.

I collected the weather section of the newspaper when I was obsessed with weather. I had about 150 clippings when I stopped doing that.