SOUTH BERWICK – The bittersweet image of a tractor-trailer pulling out from a refurbished New Hampshire mill last year with the last of five loads of old newspapers remains etched in the memories of author Nicholson Baker and his wife.

Their feelings mirrored those of the day their daughter went off to college. “It is now time for them to move on. We’ve done our best,” Margaret Brentano said.

After serving for nearly four years as caretakers to roughly 5,000 bound volumes of newspapers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Baker and Brentano donated their American Newspaper Repository to the Duke University library.

But before the newspapers were shipped out, the couple selected, photographed and captioned some of the most graphically spellbinding pages from Sunday editions of Joseph Pulitzer’s lavishly illustrated New York paper, The World.

The product of their collaboration, “The World on Sunday,” (Bulfinch Press, $50) is fascinating to history buffs, art lovers and newspaper aficionados alike.

Filled with material about life in America’s biggest city at the turn of the 20th century, the coffee-table book also serves as a window to the emergence of the multi-sectioned Sunday newspaper that offers fare for all members of the family.

Baker’s passion to preserve the collection, which also included decades-long runs of such papers as the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune and the Chicago Tribune, was the focus of his earlier book, “Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper.”

Published in 2001, it made the case that librarians were wrong to destroy their vast newspaper archives and replace them with microfilm while converting the originals to pulp or auctioning them to dealers.

When the British Library collection faced a similar fate, Baker lined up grant money, drained his personal retirement account and bought the old newspapers.

He found a home for them in a 6,000-square-foot section of the Great Mill in Rollinsford, N.H., two miles from his South Berwick home.

The couple enjoyed their role as archivists and miss the serendipitous pleasures of thumbing through the bound volumes. But the cost of running the repository – about $25,000 a year in rent alone – and the continuous need to scrape for funding made them welcome Duke’s offer to provide a home for the collection.

“We had made an important point – that two private citizens who have no particular talent in running a nonprofit can save a trove of newspapers. And if we can do it, the Library of Congress can do it and other big places can do it,” Baker said.

Duke’s offer came when Baker, best-known for such novels as “Vox,” “The Fermata” and “The Mezzanine,” had just completed “Double Fold,” and was in Durham, N.C., to speak at the opening of a new, off-campus storage site for library materials.

The facility offered high security and state-of-the-art environmental controls that could protect the old newspapers.

David Ferriero, who was then in charge of the site, told Baker to keep Duke in mind if he ever decided to give up the collection.

Baker took Ferriero up on the offer two summers later. Today, the archive resides at a comfortable 50 degrees and 35 percent humidity in a shelving module with an automated inventory control system complete with bar codes.

The newspapers are used by Duke students as well as outside researchers, some of whom travel thousands of miles to access the collection, said Robert Byrd, director of the Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library.

“We encourage people to use microfilm when that will be sufficient for their research purposes,” Byrd said. “We want to preserve [the bound volumes] for purposes that demand some aspect of utilizing the original format.”

Those uses, he said, include making copies, viewing the material in color and “having a better sense of adjacencies and how any original reader might have viewed the material.”

“The World on Sunday” covers the period from 1898, when rivals William Randolph Hearst and Pulitzer beat the drum for the Spanish-American War, to 1911, the year Pulitzer died.

The reproductions, roughly one-third the size of the original page, were taken from the news section, the magazine, the color comics, the women’s section and even the want ads, which sometimes included news and human interest stories.

The Sunday newspaper, which cost a nickel, featured everything from scandal to bathing beauties to weird science, and as Baker noted in his introduction, “weighed as much as a small roast beef.”

To photograph the pages, Baker bought a bellows camera that uses 4-by-5-inch sheet film and rigged up a 5-foot-high copy stand from an old tripod and cast-iron pipe.

Brentano spent several months poring through the volumes from the 13-year period before settling on the ones that appear in the 132-page book, including accounts by some of the era’s most noted celebrities.

An entire magazine section in 1899 was devoted to an exclusive narrative, with photographs, by Robert Peary of his unsuccessful attempt to reach the North Pole, a feat he would accomplish 10 years later.

Another edition features a Mark Twain essay, “My First Lie, and How I Got Out of It,” commissioned by the newspaper.

A special subway supplement celebrates completion of “the greatest engineering feat of modern times,” one that allowed riders to travel “from the Battery to Harlem in 15 Minutes.”

A 1906 feature, after the San Francisco earthquake, graphically depicts the destruction that would be wrought on New York if a similar disaster struck.

During their stewardship of the archives, Baker and Brentano figure they probably looked at less than 5 percent of what they had stored in the mill.

“Some volumes we never even opened,” Baker said. “There are all kinds of treasures waiting to be discovered, and it’s up to historians and scholars to discover them.”

As avid newspaper readers themselves – they get two Sunday papers – Baker and Brentano do not subscribe to the idea that the medium is poised to wilt in the face of competition from the Internet.

To Baker, much of a newspaper’s appeal rests with the size of the page and how the reader can get a measure of the major events of the day simultaneously.

“It speaks of the entire day all at once,” he said, “while the screen gives you only a little window of that day.”

On the Net: American Newspaper Repository: http:///oldpapers.org