THERE’S a modern trend for newspapers to adopt smaller and more convenient formats, but the Adver first tried it 93 years ago.

The edition in our pictures is dated Tuesday, June 9, 1925 and was found in an obscure corner of our archive.

Although barely larger than a human palm, it is perfect in every detail and can be read by anybody with extremely good eyesight, a rather large magnifying glass or a phone with a decent camera and the means of blowing up images.

One of the main stories that day was about a 17-year-old youth accused of murdering a butler.

He appeared at Marlborough Magistrates Court after being caught near Sevenoaks in Kent.

Another story was about King George V and Queen Mary travelling to Bristol and opening an extension at the university.

“The new buildings,” we said, have cost upwards of half a million pounds, generously contributed by members of the Wills family of tobacco firms.”

We also recorded the launch of the RMS Otranto, a 20,000 ton Royal Mail ship built by Vickers Armstrong at Barrow-in-Furness. The vessel was also a passenger liner, and was set to ply routes between Britain and the Far East.

But why was the newspaper so small?

A clue can be found in the top left corner, which is dominated by a story in larger print, headlined: “What is the Hospital Doing?” A sub-heading adds: “Urgent need of funds to carry on good work.”

The hospital in question was the Victoria Hospital in Okus Road, which had opened in 1888 and would eventually be converted into housing in 2009.

The story went on to explain that donations were needed to allow it to keep up with the needs of a growing population.

As many readers will have guessed when they saw our main photograph, the miniature Adver was a novelty item sold to raise funds.

Miniature newspapers, produced using a process of photographic reproduction, were a common way of promoting anything from charitable causes to trade fairs for much of the last century, and it was not unusual to encounter them as recently as the 1980s.

The later ones tended to be printed on quite strong paper, sometimes with a plastic coating, but the earlier examples, such as the miniature Adver, were printed on ordinary paper and were therefore extremely flimsy.

We wonder how many examples of this one - or any others of the kind - survive in cupboards and attics.