Jasper County Democrat, Volume 19, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 April 1916 — WAR HITS NEWSPAPERS [ARTICLE]

WAR HITS NEWSPAPERS

Every Item in Publisher's List Up Prom Ten to Fifty Per Cent. One could hardly be blamed for jumping at (conclusions and Saying, “Some distracted housewife has lost > her shopping list,” upon finding ol4« the sidewalk a scrap of paper on ■which was scribbled ‘ blankets, felt, glycerine, rubber blanket, paper and ink, muslin,” Nevertheless, the finder might be altogether wrong—perhaps the shopping list belonged to the boss buyer for the mechanical department of a newspaper. Most newspaper readers may wonder what blankets, muslin, felt, rubber sheets and other items that are handy; things to have about the house have to do with the mechanical end of a newspaper, but just at this time the buyer who dropped bis shopping list has more serious things tn wonder about. As the cost of the articles listed and other items too numerous to mention continues to climb day ,by day he is devoting what little time he has for subjective exercises to wondering when the boosting of newspaper expenses is going to stop. Ever since the momentous August of 1915 —especially during the past six months —the skyrocketing of the prices of necessities around a newspaper plant has gone on with a beauty of consistency which arouses absolutely no enthusiasm among publishers throughout the country who have to foot the bills. Products essential to the publication of news* papers have jumped in price all the W'ay from 10 to 15 to 3,000 and more per cent. War,' directly or indirectly, is given as the reason for the enormous increase in the publisher’s bills. And, as war seems likely to continue for some time, so, too, the market skyrocketing promises to go to heights even beyond the “present astounding prices. Nowadays it. is next to impossible to obtain market quotations for even so short a time ahead as “next week.’’ It should be remembered also that concrete instances of the high cost of publishing given here are (he lowest prices obtainable, because the publisher buys in large bulk. lie, cannot cut in quantity—in fact, war.

and rumors of more war mean the printing of papers far in excess of the output, of normal times, which is one, merely one, item of war time inerease in ex p enses that the thought-

less and uninformed overlook when ottering the fallacy so often heard, “the newspapers want war.” Arid the publisher does not cut in quality of material. Before the war, to begin with, the important item of tons upon tons of metal used by the stereotyping and linotyping deportments in a great metropolitan daily newspaper plant, the metal, which is a composition of lead, tin and antimony, costs BVi cents a pound. A week ago today it cost 1244 cents during the forenoon. In rhe afternoon the cost was I,'! cents. A few days later last week it was boosted to 11! 2-1 cents a pound. And so the kiting goes* on, tin' increase in cost alone amonnt-ii-.fr'.l6 t housands of dollars a year. ’l’lie various editions of newspai pern eonnot, to use a shop expression, be “put to bed” without blankets, any .more t han humans: can. And I the newspaper presses must have | the blankets in summer as well as winter—rubber blankets that are , wrapped around the press rollers j first, felt blanket;' and clean muslin | bandaging covering rubber and felt, ! this padding being necessary directly under the fast moving paper if clear-cut printing is to obtain. Also quantities of the ordinary aranyj j blankets must be bought and cut into given sizes tor the stereotypers' j use. The increase in the' cost of musi lin, which the newspapers buy by the pound, has been comparatively slight i —only about half a cent a pound . more since the ante-bellum days of [1914. The rubber and heavy felt I blanketing, however, has been juinp,ed ,at least 15 per cent. The cost of | the army blankets has gone up 20 | per cent, the quality of the army blankets at the same time going . down. j | Press rollers, which are made! j largely Of glue, glycerine and moj lasses, have gone up, so manufacturers notified the consumers last j week, 1 8 per cent. Glycerine—and | the quality used in newspaper plants jis not. the pure white glycerine one buys in drug stores, but a quality less refined-hag taken one * flying leap from an ante-bellum price of 19 cents a pound to 54 cents. Only last week also Hie paper such as is used in the rotogravure section of the Sunday Sun, which then was S cents higher than it was a year or so ago, jumped to a 10 percent in- ! crease. No pulp is coming into the manufacturers. Mills that, not' so long ago were selling by (lie tons are now filling orders for pounds. Rags, which are being bought up by the powder manufacturers eagerly and ape needed also-by paper manufacturers in a cleaned arid more or less sterilized form, are a necessity in the mechanical departments of newspapers. The price of rags has j jumped just 10 per cent, or from three cents a pound to six cents. Wrkijig paper is an ’mportant item in a publisher’s paper bill, and it is worth noting that this item has gone up 25 per cent..

But it is when the consumer of anything having to do with dyes or any\other department of the chemical section of printing and photo-! graphic reproduction goes out with his shopping list that his hair turns ■ gray. Met.ol, which the art department of a paper cannot get along without, cost $4 a pound before the war. Now it costs SSO a ‘pound. Increases of 1,000 or 3,000 per cent and more looms up all over the chemical section of the printing plant. As an ink manufacturer explained a day or two ago, the acids and dyes and everything else used in the colored inks especially have exploded from 300 to 3,000 per cent in a jiift\ once the imports from Germany had been blocked. Blues that cost r.s cents before the war now cost sl4 and sls a pound, with increases in yellows also all the way up, to 3,000 per cent. And, what is mqre of moment, the manufacturers of inks fear that prospects of filling demands in the/.future look doubtful. ; Inks for Sunday lithograph sections have more than doubled in price, with an increase on every quotation for intaglio section inks going on steadily. Even the common black inks are affected, because the rubber manufacturers are corralling as much of the carbon as they can and using it in place of zinc and lead, a detail which will account for the preponderence of rubber goods having a black cast, which shoppers soon will find on the market in place of the white oast rubber they've been accustomed to see in the shops. Type founders have increased prices 20 per cent, and no let-up in the, boosting is in sight. Gum arabic, necessary in the making of matrices. iin printing plants, has jumped 100 | per cent. And wrapping paper, used in the circulation departments by the tons, cost twice as much as it did before the war, with wrapping rope of sisa 1 from Yucatan and jute wrapping ropes and twines from Calcutta now selling at an increase almost as great.—New York Sun.