These clippings from newspapers and popular magazines cover the period January-August 1917; no clippings for the last four months of the year appear to have survived. Included is a long interview with the New York Sun in which Edison relates incidents from his days as an itinerant telegrapher and discusses his inventive career, his musical tastes, his dietary habits, and numerous other subjects. Also included is an interview, originally published in The Etude, containing Edison's views about composers such as Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy (whom he did not like), and Strauss. Some of the clippings pertain to Edison's war research, which was conducted in secret in a building at the top of Eagle Rock Mountain in West Orange, and his support for the Liberty Loan campaigns to sell war bonds. Other clippings report various threats against Edison and his interests made in anonymous letters, along with an alleged murder plot by anarchists in Chicago.

In addition, there are clippings about the celebration of Edison's seventieth birthday and the organization of the Wisconsin Cabinet & Panel Co. to manufacture cabinets for his phonographs. There is also a long article about the career of recently deceased chemist Jonas Walter Aylsworth, as well as clippings about the deaths of William G. (Billy) Bee of the Edison Storage Battery Co.; former associates James F. Cummings and James C. Hipple; and Thomas Coyle, an employee in one of Edison's phenol plants who may have died of chemical poisoning.

Approximately 50 percent of the clippings have been selected. The unselected items consist of articles unrelated to Edison and duplicate versions of the stories in the selected clippings.

There are no general scrapbooks containing clippings from this period. However, newspaper articles and other documents pertaining to Charles Edison's role in the Liberty Loan and Victory Loan campaigns, 1917-1919, can be found in four unselected scrapbooks (Cat. 44,511, Cat. 44,512, Cat. 44,513, and Cat. 44,514) at the Edison National Historical Park.