The 
Harry W. Lynch
Masthead Collection

Journalism
Collections

About the Harry W. Lynch Masthead Collection

Harry W. Lynch began his collection with the Evening Journal (Wilmington, Delaware) edition of May 7, 1932 and continued collecting up through April 22, 2003 when he added a masthead from the Wilson (N.C.) Daily Times.Somewhere along the line he added a few earlier items, so the collection actually goes back to 1927.  

Two parts of the newspaper are called mastheads and both include information about the newspapers they appear in. One appears on the top of the front page of the paper and usually has a large title, along with the publication's location and date. The other masthead is often inside the paper and includes more information about the publisher, editorial staff and editorial policies and mission. The Lewis Songer Collection is made up of the latter, while the Harry W. Lynch Collection is made up of the former.

The collection includes over 1,900 items, with newspapers from 43 of the United States and 7 other countries. Those countries span from Norway in the north to Argentina in the south and from Norway in the east to China in the west. They were arranged in 8 notebooks, of which 7 remain.

It's important to remember that the materials in this collection were brought together over 70 years.  Many of the publications represented here no longer exist.  Some of them combined with other newspapers, others simply went out of business.  For the surviving titles, it's very likely that the current masthead is markedly different than the ones Lynch collected over the years.  This combination provides us with a unique view of the last two-thirds of the 20th century's newspaper publishing history.