A Nose for News--of Prague, Tonga : Fixations: Bob Snyder of Laguna Beach culls items from worldwide papers that he finds fit to reprint, like the discovery of the world’s oldest toilet paper.

What’s black and white, read by Bob Snyder, and sent all over?

If you answered “A newspaper,” you’re only about 299 issues away from being correct.

Each month Snyder peruses some 300 English-language newspapers from around the globe. On any given morning, you might find him sequestered in the converted bedroom office of his South Laguna home, sifting through the Calcutta Weekly Statesman, the Prague Post, the Tonga Chronicle, the Aberdeen Eve Express, the Egyptian Daily Gazette, the Saskatoon Star Phoenix, the Bangkok Post, the Botswana Guardian and a host of other papers he loves to read. Over the past few months, Snyder has begun putting out his own paper, of sorts. His Worldwide News Letter contains has a wild variety of international news that rarely appears in the U.S. press.

His eight-page newsletters tell of cracks in the protective dome at Chernobyl, Korea’s advances in high-resolution TV and the illegal alien problem in Japan. They also cover the Taiwanese fad of hiring exotic dancers for funerals, the price of pig tails in Jamaica, and the discovery of the world’s oldest known toilet paper, cloth strips found in Gaza from the 4th Century.

Readers can learn that Muhammad Ali recently laid a wreath at the tomb of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, and that Virgin Airlines had to discontinue is massage service on Japanese flights because many Japanese businessmen had presumed there was more involved than just a massage.

Snyder also has listed a phone number readers can call to get ads placed on Ukrainian TV, as well as an example from the personal classifieds in an Athens paper that caught his eye: “Temperamental young lady available as an escort for foreign gentlemen.”

All these stories are culled from several issues of the hundreds of papers he reads each month, and the really sweet part of the deal for Snyder is that they are very often someone else’s newspapers. That doesn’t mean he travels around the world swiping them off lawns. Rather, the retired 66-year-old electronics and computers engineer has had a side business since 1974 of distributing the papers, and sometimes they tarry in his hands for a few hours before he sends them on to subscribers.

“Look at all this free stuff I get to read, because I read it and then I ship it out. So somebody else is paying for my reading,” Snyder declared, delighted with the prospect as only a former newsboy could be.

When he was a kid in Boston, he delivered the Boston Herald, and his cut of the three-cent price didn’t amount to much. “None of us had bicycles in those days, just a leather bag that you’d carry about 100 newspapers in,” he recalled.

Snyder thinks that, along with delivering papers, there was another event in his childhood that made the newsprint stick to him. His father was killed during World War II. Snyder still feels the impact of seeing the news in all the Boston papers, and thinks that may be one reason why newspaper stories remain so immediate to him.

Snyder’s wife, Sylvia, has her own memories of his paper addiction.

“When we were dating about 45 years ago, we’d go on a date and then come home and smooch until about 2 in the morning. Then Bob would have to walk home, which was miles, because the streetcars didn’t run that late. One day I heard my father tell my mother, ‘I saw something strange. I looked out the window at 2 or 3 in the morning and I saw Bob out reading a newspaper under a lamppost!’ ”

He first saw an international array of papers in Boston’s central library and became hooked, recalling, “I was fascinated with all the stories that we don’t usually see.” Decades later, in the mid-’70s when his electronics job was looking uncertain, Snyder was looking to start a supplemental business and decided to go with something he loved.

He started Multinewspapers in his guest bathroom, graduating to his present bedroom locale when his kids moved out. Today he does mail-order sales of 164 foreign papers and 95 domestic ones, from the big-city papers to backwater ones, and also carries a wide selection of foreign magazines. (Write to Multinewspapers, P.O. Box 866, Dana Point, Calif., 92629 for subscription information.)

“They’re always English-language papers,” he said. “I tried doing foreign-language ones, because people kept asking me, but it’s a lot harder to communicate, for one thing. You send a letter to a French newspaper and the answer comes back in French.”

Some of his customers are expatriates who want to see the news from their old country; some are businessmen; some are current-events buffs; some are from people researching the vacation or retirement possibilities of a locale. Snyder has several institutional customers--most are schools or libraries--as well as some who are institutionalized.

Snyder said, “I get a lot of orders from convicts and prisoners. Their interests are usually what you might call escapist. They want information on Brazil, Canada or will take a whole year’s subscription to the Costa Rican Tico Times. That gives me the feeling that’s where they want to retire to, though I’m sure some of these people are lifers, because their orders have been coming in for years.”

Some convicts pay him in postage stamps while others employ credit card numbers, some of which, not surprisingly, come up bogus.

As a news conduit for the world, Snyder is asked to field some odd queries. One letter-writer said he had been asking everywhere to find out about a British bog plant that would inhibit beavers from building dams on his property (Snyder actually found the answer and the man sent him $10 “breakfast money”). Another, a Nigerian official, wanted to know if Snyder would be interested in laundering $10 million for him. One party in Saudi Arabia wanted issues of Playboy and Penthouse, but only if Snyder would ship them in a plain envelope.

“Then, I had someone in Korea order a Korean magazine from me. I sure couldn’t figure that one out,” Snyder said.

His catalogues offer a number of options. Subscribers can opt for a random sampling of global papers, or target a specific region of interest, or choose specific papers. They also pick how frequently and for how long they want to receive them, and choose the type of mail delivery, all of which influences the subscription price.

Air-mailed papers usually take two to five days to arrive--Snyder receives his Sunday Egyptian Daily Gazette on Thursdays--while ground transport usually takes several weeks. A paper from central Africa may take eight weeks to arrive, but the real tortoise of the world is the Philippines. For reasons Snyder has never been able to fathom, it can take up to eight months for a paper to arrive from there.

Snyder’s favorite global newspapers include the Jerusalem Post, the London Telegraph, the London Times and the Moscow News. He also has an opinion about the what the least newsworthy papers are.

“It’s the Indian ones. They might be very interesting to Indians, but to me it’s just page after page of nothing,” he said, holding up a recent issue of the Sunday Times of India. The lead headline on the front page was, “Fertilizer Subsidy to Continue.” Perhaps the most curious aspect of the thick paper is its second page, which is filled with matrimonial advertisements.

Snyder says the South African papers have been of particular interest recently, because of the changes taking place there. “There are many things you read in those papers you usually don’t see in the ones here. When (Nelson) Mandela and (South African President Fredrik W.) de Klerk were in the U.S. over the Fourth of July, our papers reported President Clinton giving them a medal, but what they didn’t report was that those two had a big fight, arguing and screaming at each other,” he said.

He shared some other headlines that have been grabbing attention in different nations recently. In Russia, one magazine asked, “Will the Mafia Bail Out Our Economy?” Drum, a Kenyan magazine, was also in a question-asking mood: “Should Iman Have More Than One Husband?” The super-model was shown strolling with new hubbie David Bowie.

Snyder enjoys the Beijing Review for its features on new Chinese inventions, such as a magnetic foot massager and, he said, “a brassiere with herbs in it, which, along with other ailments, cured cancer and enlarged the breasts.” He keeps an eye out for such items for his newsletter, to balance its more sober news and business information.

His subscribers receive thousands of papers a month--only a relative few pass through Snyder’s hands; most are shipped direct from the papers to the customers--but Snyder’s main interest lately is in building interest in his newsletter, which only has a few hundred subscribers so far. After a lifetime of reading newspapers, he likes the experience of editing one.

According to his wife, he only recently got a taste of the drama that can be involved in news-gathering.

“The other day at the post office he reached into the PO box just as a female postal worker was putting mail in from the other side. Their hands touched in there, and they both screamed at once,” Sylvia said with a laugh.