He has the history of the world crammed into scrapbooks at his home.
But James Clayton’s newspaper collection doesn’t stretch to the articles themselves.
Instead, the former Huddersfield printer has amassed hundreds of newspaper mastheads – the title pieces on top of the front pages.
It is a collection he started while working as an apprentice printer in the former Huddersfield firm of Netherwood Dalton more than 65 years ago.
He and colleagues would unwrap printing plates and images sent to them from every corner of the UK and indeed the world – and found that many were wrapped in newspapers of the time.
Mr Clayton decided to save them and now has a record of the world’s news-paper industry stretching back some 60 years.
He said: “Sixty years ago I was an apprentice compositor with Netherwood, Dalton & Sons, printers of a wide range of products, but predominantly books.
“The plates used in these books were made elsewhere and sent to the firm wrapped in a variety of materials, including old newspapers.
“After a while, another apprentice and I started putting these aside but soon the collection was growing too big to handle.
“One of the journeymen compositors had the idea of persuading the bookbinders at the firm to make a large scrapbook from the used brown wrappers off large reams of paper.
“Bound between hard covers, it presented a new challenge and gave some kind of order to the collection.”
Mr Clayton, now 77, had joined the firm as a teenage apprentice in 1951 and worked there for six years. He then worked for a spell at the Halifax Courier before switching to the Huddersfield Examiner’s Ramsden Street base for a couple of years.
In 1965, he and his wife Jean moved to Norwich, after they had lived in Newsome and Birchencliffe.
The collection went with him and Mr Clayton said: “Very soon other people added to the collection.
“Contributions came from far and wide, with friends and family connections overseas.
“Now the collection runs to several hundred mastheads. There are some famous newspaper names in there and quite a few obscure ones, as well as many that have long since gone.
“Many of the papers have gone out of circulation – the News Chronicle, for example – but I still keep that little bit of history.
“I must confess I threw away most of the news articles, but did keep one or two, including ones when Queen Victoria died and the newspapers turned the column rules round to give the spread some gravitas.
“I also have a special gold copy of the Daily Mail masthead which I treasure.
“I don’t know what they call a collector of mastheads – a nutter, I suppose.”
