Estate sale find

 Three weeks ago, I was at an estate sale and came across an interesting book. It is a reproduction of Edgar Allan Poe’s manuscript for The Murders in the Rue Morgue. It was published in 1895 by George Barrie in Philadelphia using the manuscript housed at the Drexel Institute. 

It’s a large book, 17” by 11”and printed on very heavy paper. As interesting as the manuscript is, I bought it for what comes before it. The leaves before the title page have been used as a sort of scrap book. At the top there is a title written in script, “The Morgue of M. E. Meegs” and the year, 1901. Below that are three newspaper clippings and three more on the facing page, and there seem to places where two others fell out..

Since buying the book I have been trying to figure out if M.E. Meegs was a real person. The stories in the clippings all seem nonsensical, though some more than others. I also found it odd that the newspaper hadn’t seemed to yellow the way old newspaper seems to. The pages of the book itself are cream colored and make the newspaper clippings in the photos look whiter than they do close up, but they are definitely whiter than I would expect a 110 year-old newspaper to look.

I asked my former son-in-law about the paper (he is an engineer at a paper company in Maine) and he told me that newspapers previously were published on paper that was less acidic and didn’t yellow the same way they do now. 

I’ve done searches on the name M. E. Meegs, Micheal E. Meegs, Martha E. Meegs, etc.,  but nothing likely comes up in the results.