Victorian EDP wears well after 113 years

It's the EDP but not as you know it - brimming with adverts for quack medicines and silk gloves and stories of drivers caught speeding at 12mph. The pages crackle to the touch and are coated with a fine layer of grit.

It's the EDP but not as you know it - brimming with adverts for quack medicines and silk gloves and stories of drivers caught speeding at 12mph. The pages crackle to the touch and are coated with a fine layer of grit.

But the EDP from 11 April 1894 is in remarkable condition - particularly as it has spent more than 100 years under a floorboard in a Dereham shop.

Philip Morter, director of family-run electrical store Bennetts (Dereham) Ltd, uncovered the yellowed sheets of the EDP and the Lowestoft Weekly News tucked away in storage buildings at the back of the store in Norwich Street.

To the modern reader - used to colour photos and half-page headlines - the slim broadsheet is almost impenetrable, page after page of tiny text squashed together into intimidating slabs of print.

The shop has been in the Bennett family for three generations and the find has inspired Mr Morter to replace the paper alongside a 2007 copy, in the hope that it will be uncovered by his ancestors in another 100 years.

Mr Morter said: "The builders found one copy and then another and kept uncovering them.

"The type of stories you can find inside are really interesting.

"There really is no comparison with the today's paper but I wish I could still buy a house at those prices.

"We want to put them back with some modern-day EDPs and hopefully my great-grandson will pull the floorboards up and uncover them one day."

The storage buildings began life as cottages before being turned into storage units for Cookes shoe shop and then for Bennetts when it opened 60 years ago. The storage buildings are being turned into shop units and office space. It is hoped the work will be completed by Easter.