Ephemera exhibitions, catalogues and books (1)

There are currently several ephemera exhibitions, in this country and in the U.S.A.

This week, I went to The London Transport Museum's Poster Art 150: London Underground's Greatest Designs. Superb posters, with a public voting system to select the most popular poster. The exhibition is arranged into themes:: Finding your way, Brightest London, Capital culture, Away from it all , Keeps London going and Love your city.  There is a catalogue, reproducing the posters. The exhibition runs until 27 October.

The British Library has a major exhibition: Propaganda: Power and Persuasion (17 May to 17 September).

Propaganda: Power and Persuasion home page: (C) British Library Board

There are events, tours, a blog and a catalogue by Prof David Welch.

In the USA, the exhibition Ephemera: the art of everyday printed mattter has just opened at the Portsmouth Athenaeum and runs until  15 September.

(C) Portsmouth Athenaeum

The Library Company of Philadelphia (the subject of previous blog posts: 13 Feb 2012 and, guest post by Erika Piola, 29 June 2012) meanwhile has an exhibition Remnants of everyday life: historical ephemera in the workplace, street and home, which runs until 15 December 2013.

There is also a related ephemera conference: Unmediated history, the scholarly study of 19th century ephemera (Visual Culture Program of the Library Company of Philadelphia and Ephemera Society of America) at the LCP  from 19 to 20 September 2013.

While I could not find any links to exhibition catalogues for either USA exhibition, this is a good chance to promote the Library Company of Philadelphia's recent project: Philadelphia on Stone, which has an online exhibition, digital catalogue and a major publication: Philadelphia on Stone: Commercial Lithography in Philadelphia, 1828-1878, edited by Erika Piola.

Finally, a new, scholarly book on ephemera has just been published. Studies in Ephemera: text and image in eighteenth-century print, ed. by Kevin Murphy and Sally O'Driscoll, Lewisburg (Bucknell University Press) focuses mainly on ballads (including a chapter on ballad images by the Bodleian's Alexandra Franklin) and broadsides.  There are also chapters by Sally O'Driscoll on macaronis in print culture and  by Georgia Barnhill on Ephemera at the American Antiquarian Society: perspectives on commercial life in the long eighteenth century.  The superb ephemera in the AAS have been digitised and are available to subscribers only through Readex. Sadly, the Bodleian does not subscribe.

Studies in Ephemera is also widely available as an e-book