Why the OED is scant for the 18th century :-)

[Joel S. Berson]

"... the British Museum's newspaper warehouse [was]  in a suburb of
London, crammed with irreplaceable files of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century journals.  On October 20, 1940, it was bombed out,
and for three days thereafter the exposed ruins were drenched with
rain, with the result that some 30,000 volumes of newspapers were destroyed."

Richard D. Altrick, The Scholar Adventurers (New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1950), p. 235.

Well, I suppose there are some books from the 18th century still at
the British Museum.  But this may account for the sparseness of
18th-century English newspaper files, such as the Burney Collection.

Joel

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