A microfilm reel is a fixed number of frames, indexed page by page when it was made, and the reader counts frames as the film winds. One reel of the local paper from 1961 has a frame between two pages that the index does not list, the counter counts it, and it is a page of that paper for a day the paper did not print.
I look after the local studies collection, which is mostly newspapers on microfilm, and the readers are mine to keep running.
How a reel is used.
The index card for each reel lists the dates and page ranges and the frame numbers they sit at. You load the reel, wind to the frame, and there is the page. The reader's counter advances one per frame, mechanically, off the sprocket.
The reels were filmed in the 1970s by a contractor and the frame counts on the cards were checked when they were delivered, because a reel with a miscount is a reel where nothing can be found.
The reel for the local paper for April 1961 has forty frames listed between the issue of the fourteenth and the issue of the twenty first.
It has forty one.
The paper was a weekly. The fourteenth was a Friday and so was the twenty first, and there was no issue in between, and the card lists none.
Frame forty one is a front page. It carries the paper's masthead, the price, and a date, and the date is Tuesday the eighteenth of April 1961.
What is on it.
A front page. Headlines, a photograph, columns of text in the paper's typeface, set in the paper's style, for a Tuesday edition of a paper that never printed on a Tuesday.
The stories are local. They concern people and places that are in the other issues on the reel, and they report things that the Friday issue either side does not mention and that the paper's own bound volumes, which we also hold, do not contain.
I have read it perhaps a dozen times. There is a story about a house on a road I know, and I am not going to say more than that, except that the house is still there and I have driven past it and I do not any more.
What has been checked.
The reel. It is the original, in its original box, with the contractor's label, and it has been in a drawer in a locked room since 1974.
The index card. Forty frames, in the contractor's hand, checked and initialled on delivery.
Another copy. The county record office holds a duplicate reel struck from the same negative in the same year. I asked them to check frame forty one. Their reel has forty frames in that span, and the duplicate of frame forty is the twenty first, and there is nothing between.
The reader. Three readers. The frame counter on all three advances forty one times through that span, because there are forty one frames of film. The film is longer, by one frame, than its duplicate.
The negative.
The contractor is long gone but their negatives went to a national archive, and in 2022 I asked for the span to be checked.
The negative has forty frames.
A positive print with a frame the negative does not have is a thing a photographic technician told me, over the phone, cannot exist, and asked me to send the reel, and I said I would think about it.
What is done about it.
The index card has a pencil note in my hand that says forty one frames, unindexed frame at forty one, and the reel is available to readers, because it is the archive and the archive is available.
Nobody has asked for that span of that reel in the years I have been counting, except me.
What I do.
I keep the readers running and the reels in order.
The one thing I have changed is that I do not wind past frame forty on that reel, and when a reader asks for the twenty first I load the next reel, which begins with it, and say the earlier one is damaged.
The last time I wound through was 2023, on the reader nearest the window, and frame forty one came up on the screen as it does, and I read the front page as I have read it before, and the date on the masthead was not the eighteenth of April 1961.
It was a date in the coming week. I wound back to frame forty, which was the fourteenth, and forward again, and it was the eighteenth of April 1961, and I have not been back to see what it says now.