On 10 March 2020, Vaibhav Singh and his imprint Contextual Alternate conducted a project to collect newspapers of a single day from around the world, with no inkling of things to come!. 10 March 2020 marked the last day before the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic that has continued to reshape our world in critical ways. As the restrictions and lockdowns started coming into effect worldwide, the ‘Drafts of history’ project ended up creating a publicly sourced archive of that pivotal moment, with over 1,200 newspapers that have since been gradually displayed online.
The project had taken as its point of departure a previous nineteenth century attempt to create an international archive of the press: a fascinating collection of newspapers from March 1888. Contextual Alternate is now ready to unveil a new book that offers a visual catalogue of over 200 newspapers from that time.
For information available here.