Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 281, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 November 1912 — “Backnumber Joe” Quits Business With a Fortune [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

“Backnumber Joe” Quits Business With a Fortune

NEW YORK. —Lawyers of this city who handle will cases requiring a search of early records lament the retirement of “Backnumber Joe,” for he was their first-aid and searcher-in-chief in digging up • facts from the archives. “Backnumber Joe,” despite his name, never lost touch with the events of the day. His specialty, though, was the accumulation of back numbers of newspapers, back numbers of magazines, back numbers of religious tracts, back numbers of comic suppletaents, and back numbers of almost anything that ever was printed. Even if “Backnumber Joe” did not have the particular copy of an old newspapeP needed by a lawyer who was straightening out a tangled suit,

he always managed to get the desired publication in the course of a few days. How he did it was a trade secret for which he made his customers pay well. v His system of payment was the strangest feature of his novel business. He fixed the price he demanded by the age of the paper desired. “One penny a day from the date of publication, for any paper in the world, in addition to the original cost of the paper was his rule. It was a lucrative trade. A paper a year old, by this rule, was worth $3.65 above the original price; a paper two years old was worth $7.30, and a pated ten years old brought $36.50. And when it is borne in mind that very often he supplied newspapers 30, 50, or even 100 years old, the profits of the business are apparent. As the fame of Joe grew among lawyers and antiquarians, he acquired more and more stock and needed larger quarters for it than he originally occupied in his little shop in Fulton street. For many years he stored his papers in a warehouse of hii own somewhere on the West side of the city.