Blog post prepared by Periodicals Library Assistant, Megan Vaughan

For the past several years Hocken staff have been working on rehousing our oldest and most precious newspapers in archival boxes. We discovered this copy of the Otago News copied out by hand. The rest of Dr Hocken’s collection of the Otago News are the printed copies but this particular issue is missing from the run.

This unfinished copy is in a mixture of both Dr Hocken and his wife Elizabeth’s (Bessie) handwriting. The masthead is in Dr Hocken’s handwriting and the rest is Bessie’s (confirmed after looking at a letter from Bessie to Hocken). Bessie copied many items for Dr Hocken’s collection and without her work his collection would be much poorer.

The masthead in Dr Hocken’s writing, the rest in Bessie’s.

A list of custom duties advertised on the front page

An example of a sketch of an ethnographic object from Bessie’s sketchbook with her handwriting alongside Dr Hocken’s.