When a news item from Madrid was republished in Stockholm at the end of the sev-enteenth century, it might be a month and a half old. By then, the same passage oftext had travelled and materialised widely across much of the European continent.Just over one hundred years later, a local Swedish editor could boast that he was ableto bring stories to press faster than the official Stockholm newspaper because he hadsecured a steady delivery of German publications to cut from, while his colleagues inthe capital relied on much older English newspapers. And although, throughout mostof press history, cutting must be understood metaphorically, a pair of scissors and abottle of glue became actual tools of journalistic practice during the nineteenth cen-tury. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, the telegraph became an importantpart of the infrastructure for the dissemination of texts that were reprinted. Around1900, advertising campaigns – that is, mass reprinting from a single source, althoughnot reused in a chain or relay-like fashion – were conducted on an almost globalscale. And in the 1930s, by means of stereotype plates or lighter so-called flongs, a suc-cessful Australian author could have three serials running simultaneously in as manyas forty newspapers. Shared newspaper content has a long and rich history.