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FILE 067 · VOL XII · They Rehearsed This
The Flu Killed Millions. The Papers Were Told to Smile.
Whatever you print on the front page, people will walk toward.
Based on: The 1918 Flu and Wartime Censorship
Intake record
| Recovered from | Basement of a demolished newspaper building, North Broad Street, Philadelphia |
|---|---|
| Contents | A wooden type drawer (incomplete), eleven galley proofs with pencil marks, a compositor's pay envelope |
| Finder | Demolition foreman; sold to a collector of printing equipment |
| Status | Type drawer withheld. It is missing six letters. |
| On the record | Real history is cited with numbered sources. Everything else, use your own judgment. |
Recovered file
Margin, in pencil: Moved from page one to page nine by order of Mr. Haldane. I set it in six point, which is the size we use for lost dogs.
Clara Wren was a compositor. She stood at a slanted wooden case for ten hours a day and built the news one metal letter at a time, upside down and backward, faster than most people could read it forward. She was thirty-one, a widow since the Marne, with a nine-year-old son named Walter who had her husband's cowlick and his cough.
The drawer came to her that summer, when old Mr. Pell retired. It was a type case older than the building, the letters worn soft at the corners. Pell told her it had been in the shop since 1793, the year yellow fever killed roughly a tenth of Philadelphia, and that the printer who owned it then had set the death lists in it every morning for three months. [1]
He showed her the words burned into the inside of the lid with a hot nail.
She thought he meant that people trusted the paper. He meant something else.
The rest of this file is sealed. The ending, the sources and the archivist's note unseal with the file.
Unseal File 067 ($2.99) · its volume · everything ($49.99)
Built on real, cited records. The stories are dramatized. Disclaimer · If you are in crisis in the U.S., call or text 988.