Byline: By ED JAMES
IN two months' time, on June 11, the Daily Post will be exactly 150 years old: a century and a half which has seen the world transformed unrecognisably from the first hesitant steps of the early industrial revolution to the anxious legacy of the nuclear.
When the Daily Post was launched as a business -- Britain's first Penny Newspaper -- the UK was waging a messy and inconclusive war against the Russians in Crimea and the brief flowering of Empire had scarcely begun.
So what has happened since? Since Sevastopol in some 700, 000 pages of the Daily Post (all 47, 457 editions of it) are contained the day-byday reports of the events which have shaped the course of history in Wales, in Britain and throughout the world.
Facts, reaction, analysis, opinion and pictures, not to mention sports, fashion, recipes and all the other elements of human life.
To mark our anniversary, a sample of this potted but comprehensive history is now on show to the public at Bodelwyddan Castle, Denbighshire, in the shape of a selection of landmark front pages or accounts of momentous happenings, local, regional, national and international.
In a unique joint community initiative, the Daily Post has also teamed up with Bodelwyddan Castle Trust and Arts and Business Cymru to use the exhibits as the basis for a series of writing, design and print workshops led by local artists who will help students use the techniques involved in putting together newspapers to enrich their own work.
The Daily Post's senior assistant editor, Mark Brittain, who has arranged the show, said: 'Clearly we have an incomparable regional archive as well as recording news from Britain and abroad and we wanted to mark our anniversary by making as much of it as possible available to the public.
'We didn't just want an exhibition though. Rows and rows of fading, crumbling newspapers would not have appeared very exciting on their own.
'We wanted to involve the community in a meaningful way too, and give something back.
'Newspapers are more than just fragile records and throw-aways, though of course they are designed to be that as well.
'The essential mix of design and text makes them display objects in their own right, like posters, reflecting the times they were produced and the tastes and styles of their day. They are invaluable social records, ' he said.
'I have tried to select images of front pages which tell more of a story than just the words they contain.
'Certainly there are landmarks without which any comparable exhibition would be incomplete -- the sinking of the Titanic, for example -- but I also wanted to have a lot of local news and, just as importantly, show how designs and headline writing have evolved to reflect contemporary trends.
'A tabloid headline today is a form of shorthand which would have been incomprehensible to a reader in 1855, though the news, in the main, doesn't change very much at all.
'Sadly we still have wars and natural disasters, train crashes, political scandals.
'If you just look at the content you don't get much of an impression that anything has changed at all. Which is, in its way, fascinating as well. '
Mr Brittain said that, given the constraints of gallery space and the massive task of viewing the vast archive -- a process which would have taken years -- the show has had to be subjective.
Apart from the Titanic, the pages chosen include those other closer-tohome maritime disasters, the Thetis and the Royal Charter; the defence of Rorke's Drift against the Zulus; the assassination of J. F. Kennedy; the first man-made steps on the moon; Britain's 1939 declaration of war on Germany; the Aberfan tragedy; the Beatles' psychedelic visit to Bangor; Towyn floods; the death of Princess Di; Ron Davies' 'badger-watching' episode; the racist cops revelation and the Welsh soccer team robbed in Azerbaijan.
There are 53 panels in all, all of them capable of bringing back a host of associated memories.
The show is titled The Art of News and is accompanied by a programme researched and written by local historian and Daily Post journalist Ivor Wynne Jones.
Mr Brittain said: 'We couldn't use original pages which would have been far too delicate, but same-size facsimiles from our microfilmed archive would have been illegible unless viewed from very close.
'However once you select and then blow-up an image and hang it on the wall of a gallery, you are making a statement about that image quite distinct from it's original everyday purpose.
'A newspaper page, then becomes a form of art in its own right, but newspapers really could have been made for exhibition anyway.
'They are abstract pictures in themselves, with areas of light and dark in carefully designed proportion to make them easy on the eye. I actually think they are rather beautiful. '
n The exhibition opens tomorrow and runs for eight weeks until June 5.
CAPTION(S):
The front page of the first Daily Post, published on June 11, 1855; The Daily Post, Septemebr 7, 2004The Daily Post, April 21, 1969; The Daily Post, July 21, 1969; Chanda Bedford, marketing officer at Bodelwyddan Castle, helps set up the exhibition
