The older newsprint was more durable than what we see now. The paper making process was much more primitive, so the paper actually did add a layer of warmth. I remember my mom talking about crackly quilts when I was young. Batting was costly, old newspaper was cheap. Think about the depression era...

All this talk of how they used to use newspapers, made me think of my great-granny. She used layers of newspapers between the mattress and the metal springs of the beds, so if they rusted ,it wouldn't get on the mattress.

When I was a teenager, I met a lady who made quilts using newspaper as a foundation. Her quilts were a crazy quilt type. I say type, because they were not fancy as some of the ones we see in museums and books. They were strickly utilitarian. She said she left the paper in. She started making quilts like this during the depression, because this is all they had. Also, she used scraps of fabric from well-worn clothes that just couldn't be mended anymore.

How far we have come. Most of us wouldn't think about cutting good pieces from a worn garment. And I am so glad.

I couldn't get the link to work. Do you have another?

I do all the time, and I have lots of yardage of store-bought fabric already.
Started a quilt (still unfinished and he's 18) for my grandson using only pieces of family clothing.
I even stop sometime at garage/yard sales and buy a cotton garment if it's fabric that appeals to me. You can find some really interesting fabric doing this.

I just cut into a silk dress to make a pillow out of it, and brown paper was all throughout the dress, sewn into the seams. It wasn't newspaper, it was more like construction or freezer papwer, brown in color, not glossy, soft. I was really surprised to be dealing with paper as part of the inside. It was a dress worn during WWII by a woman in a concentration camp.

We visited the Truman house in Independence, Missouri and it seems to me I recall that Pres. Truman had flattened out some tin to repair holes in his kitchen floor.

they probably used it to keep it from sliding every which way and just left it in the seams b/c it was too much trouble to remove.

The orginal reason for bed sheets and bed spreads was to keep those quilts clean. Quilts were seldom washd, but the linens protected the quilts and mattresses. I have an old old housekeeping book cc 1830 that discusses such ideas as emptying the linen closet every spring, hanging the quilts in the sunshine, boiling the linens. Even in the 1950's, the directions for washing blankets were quite involved, and happened very seldom. In cases of contagious disease, bedcoverings were often burned, because cleaning was so cumbersome and actually mostly ineffective.
All of this, including the idea that paper was indeed often made from rags, and often indeed used for batting and insulation.

If it was from a woman in a concentration camp, she could have added the paper to make the dress warmer.