American Advertising

The Art of American Advertising 1865-1910 is an exhibition at the Baker Library of the Harvard Business School. Drawing extensively on its historical collections, the exhibition takes an analytical approach to the use of art in relation to its themes:: National Markets, Advertising Products, Trade Catalogs, Trade Cards, Souvenirs & Novelties, Scrapbooks & Collectibles, The Art of 'Posting',  Brand Name Management, and A Marketing Revolution.

The online version is extensively  illustrated and can be seen either as a series of illustrated essays, or as galleries.

(C) Harvard Business School. Baker Library

Meanwhile, the Winterthur Museum Library has impressive online content relating to its advertising collections, with thousands of images. The numbers attached to the suggested searches speak for themselves. This is a very rich resource: Book industries (83), Clocks and watches (328), Clothing and dress (235), Department stores/Dry goods (173), Food (261), Furniture (492), Jewelry (414), Medicine (187), Music (156), Pottery (59), Sewing (234), Stoves (114), Tobacco (149), Advertisements (125), Poster stamps (1840), Trade cards (4018), Textile fabrics (94).

There is more: much more: images of Bookplates, French candy wrappers, Funeral and Mourning Ephemera (the William Frost Mobley Collection), Indentures, Lantern Slides, and 171 calendars and 295 cigar labels from the Grossman Collection. The image quality is outstanding, with zoom enabling every detail of the printing process (chromolithography in the case of the Grossman collection) to be studied.

All collections have overviews, outlining their extent and scope. The Grossman Collection, which I was privileged to see many years ago in California, has c. 250,000 items of high-quality ephemera.

I also particularly like the click-through facility in all fields, which enables you to see images of trellis, for example, across the collections.

As described in a previous post, more than 900 trade catalogs are available through the Internet Archive.

Content is continually being added and subscriptions to RSS feeds are available at collection level.

Culture Grid

Culture Grid is a platform through which institutional collections can be cross-searched. These include pre-existing cross-searchable projects such as VADS (and therefore the John Johnson Collection Political Cartoons and Trades and Professions Prints) and Exploring 20th century London.

The site is rich in ephemera, notably posters, advertisements, postcards, labels, etc. The three million items can either be searched by such genre terms or by subject (which can be narrowed down to posters, etc), or by institution.

(C) Culture Grid

 
The list of contributing institutions (which can be found by searching, then selecting 'more search options' and activating the 'Select collections' button) is extensive and includes regional collections, with many gems for the ephemerist.

 

(C) Culture Grid

 








 


I didn't find a browse function or a way just to get an overview of the contribution of each institution, but for real researchers doing real enquiries this site will reveal lesser known material.

Valentines: more resources

It is valentine season again and time to highlight collections both here at the Bodleian and elsewhere.

This year, I have joined with the National Valentine Collectors Association to focus on the valentines of Eugène Rimmel.  My own contribution is a small virtual exhibition about Rimmel's advertising and his association with the Theatre on my blog: The John Johnson Collection Now and Then.  Nancy Rosin has devoted the winter issue of The Valentine Writer (the journal of the National Valentine Collectors Association) to an excellent article on Rimmel (available as a pdf) and Malcolm Warrington has created a beautiful online exhibition.  There are also posts about Comic valentines (and the 200th anniversary of De La Rue) on the UK Ephemera Society's Facebook page.

Also from the other side of the Atlantic, many thanks to Nancy Rosin for recommending The Virtual Museum of Canada, which has a virtual exhibition:  Valentine's Day:  love and romance through the ages, complete with the facility to open and rotate three-dimensional pop-up valentines (in QTVR files) and to create and send valentines from a museum object, card or artefact  for electronic delivery.  A lot of fun, but also solid information about the history not only of valentine cards, but of other love offerings.There are 1229 hits for valentines from various Canadian institutions in the image gallery.

(C) Virtual Museum of Canada

Back in Britain, The Museum of London has put online 1788 valentines, manufacturers' sample sheets and related material, mostly from the prestigious Jonathan King Collection. Jonathan King was a valentine maker in Essex Road, London and this collection gives a wonderful and invaluable insight into the manufacturing process. As well as complete valentines, there are proofs with annotations made in the workshop, relating to design and price, stock number etc. Each item is captioned and dated.  There is also a blog: The more unusual valentines in our collection.

(C) Museum of London

 The Discover pages of the (new) Library of Birmingham include introductions to the history of valentines, and to Comic valentines, with two galleries featuring sentimental and comic cards from their collections.  Similar pages are devoted to Birthday cards, Greetings cards illustrated by Kate Greenaway, Silk embroidered postcards, First World War song cards, and Miscellaneous greetings cards.

(C) Library of Birmingham

Hull Museums also have a large collection of valentines.

(C) Hull Museums

(C) The British Postal Museum & Archive

The British Postal Museum and Archive has a fascinating online exhibition Passion through the post highlighting its collections and outlining the history of the valentine, from the perspective of the postal historian.Their valentines are catalogued, with 892 hits for a  simple search for valentine, some accompanied with thumbnail images.

Ephemera at Chetham's Library, Manchester

Chetham's Library in Manchester has rich collections of printed ephemera, most of which are catalogued, including bookplates, postcards, chapbooks, broadsides, ballads, theatre programmes, posters, trade cards and bill heads.

The Chethams website has a very useful guide to discrete collections of rare books and printed ephemera, notable among which are the Halliwell-Phillipps collection (donated to the library in 1852), a fne collection of scrapbooks of local material and the Belle Vue zoo and gardens archive.

(C) Chetham's Library, Manchester

There is project to digitise ballads across all Manchester libraries, including the newly-acquired (and already indexed) Robert Holt Collection of Manchester Street Songs and Ballads.

Victorian Popular Culture (Adam Matthew)

Victorian Popular Culture, published by Adam Matthew Digital, is a subscription-only resource, which is available here at the Bodleian Library, through SOLO and OxLIP+ and in many other research libraries.  It perfectly complements the Entertainment section of ProQuest's The John Johnson Collection: an archive of printed ephemera. Its main sections are Music hall, theatre and popular entertainment; Circuses, sideshows and freaks; Moving pictures, optical entertainments and the advent of cinema; and Spiritualism, sensation and magic.

Although, as the title implies, largely based on the Victorian era, there is one item dating back to the16th century, four from the 17th and a large number from the 18th and 20th centuries.

The material is from:
The Harry Price Library of Magical Literature, Senate House, University of London
Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin
National Fairground Archives, University of Sheffield (see my last post)
The National Archives (UK)
Chetham's Library, Manchester
May Moore Duprez Archives
The Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture, University of Exeter
BFI National Archive

Features include full-text searching, a chronological timeline, essays, secondary resources, slide shows, innovative 360 degree technologies, audio files from Saydisc records and video clips.

(C) Adam Matthew Digital

It is always a pleasure to be able to cross-search collections, especially such rich ones. There are the usual search and advance search options and also browsable lists by title, author, date and type of material.  A symbol indicates which section of the project the material is from (e.g  the card symbol above for Spiritualism, sensation and magic). Although books, diaries, correspondence, journals, etc  are included, the substance of the project is ephemera. 

This is an indispensable resource for Entertainment historians.

Virtual exhibition: Jeux de princes, Jeux de vilains (BNF)

A quick post on a virtual exhibition of games which I came across on the Bibliothèque Nationale de France site. A little difficult to find, it is called Jeux de princes, jeux de vilains.  Based on a physical exhibition in 2009, it contextualises games through images not only of the games themselves, but also works of art showing games being played, and ephemera.

The exhibition is divided into the sinister and pleasurable sides of games and their place in society:  La face noire du jeu, Les plaisirs du jeu and La société ludique.

There are guided tours by the curators, commentaries on significant items and drop-down menus enabling the user to explore various aspects of playing cards, tarot, chess and children's games (les feuilletoirs). Many manifestations of Game of the goose are online. Much to explore, and to enjoy.

(C) Bibliothèque Nationale de France

Australasian ephemera: guest post by Anthony Tedeschi

I am delighted to open the new season of the John Johnson Collection's Ephemera Resources blog with the first of two guest posts by Anthony Tedeschi, Rare Books Librarian at Dunedin City Library. This post focuses on New Zealand ephemera . Many thanks to him for sharing his knowledge of ephemera collections on the other side of the world.

All images are courtesy of the Heritage Collections, Dunedin City Library, Dunedin, New Zealand

Programme for a show touring New Zealand to raise funds for the country's 

armed services during the Second World War

Australasian Ephemera Collections – Part 1: New Zealand

One of the four courses offered during this year’s Australian & New Zealand Rare Book Summer School held at the State Library of Victoria (SLVA), Melbourne, was ‘Ephemera: A Collector’s Key to the History of Books’. Each morning the course instructor, Emeritus Professor Wallace Kirsop, lead us on a highly informative tour through book dealer catalogues, type specimens, printers’ and binders’ bills and labels, prospectuses, and other bibliographical ephemera. In the afternoons, the class was treated to presentations by some of the SLVA curators and paid a visit to the rare books collection of Monash University.

Meeting my fellow classmates and learning about the ephemera actively collected by two of Melbourne’s many cultural / educational institutions piqued my curiosity: What other collections of ephemera – not only in Australia but in New Zealand as well – are ‘out there’? Of course most libraries and museums will have some ephemera in their collections, such as the programmes printed on silk, railway pass and phrenological chart of Sir George Grey’s head held in the Auckland City Libraries, Sir George Grey Special Collections. Rather than attempt to record every institution, this post (the first of two) aims to highlight those organisations that maintain dedicated ephemera collections. It is hoped readers aware of other collections in New Zealand and Australia will contribute to this list by way of comments.

Theatre programme, Oct 30 1926

DunedinCity Library, Heritage Collections

The City Library Heritage Collections holds a collection of over 400 pieces of ephemera relating primarily to Dunedin, but touching on some national topics as well. Pamphlets, menus, printed advertisements, brochures, all on a range of subjects. The collection is particularly strong in theatre and music ephemera, and in material related to exhibitions held in New Zealand and overseas.

In addition to this dedicated ephemera collection, Robert McNab, who donated his collection of 4,200 books to the library in 1913, also gave over multiple volumes of bound tracts and pamphlets.

N.B. The website states that the ephemera collection is uncatalogued, which is now outdated information. The collection has been fully catalogued and can be browsed in the library catalogue [select ‘Power Search’ – drop-down menu ‘location’ – DP McNab Ephemera Collection]

Hocken Library

There are 140.5 archives shelves and 125.5 book shelves of printed ephemera, not including material held in the posters collection or art ephemera.

The scope of the ephemera collection is to support those of the other Hocken collections and encompasses general New Zealand themes, and Otago and Southland in particular. It is representative rather than comprehensive and includes material for its informative and/or aesthetic value. Especial emphasis and priority is given to University of Otago and Hocken Collections ephemera. Music ephemera relating to the Dunedin area, and artists' and election ephemera for all of New Zealand are given priority. The collection is strong in classical music, fine arts and the performing arts, as well as educational and tourism material. Material ranges in age from the nineteenth century to the current day.

Like McNab, Dr. T. M. Hocken’s 1908 gift to the nation included bound tracts, programmes and book dealer catalogues.

[Description provided by Katherine Milburn, Liaison Librarian (Ephemera), Hocken Library]

Museum ofNew Zealand / Te Papa Tongarewa

As a national repository, Te Papa’s collection is one of New Zealand’s largest. Many of the museum’s separate collections, such as Artworks, Fashion and the First World War each actively collect ephemera.

NationalLibrary of New Zealand (general ephemera)

The National Library of New Zealand boasts the country’s largest collection of ephemera. The Manuscripts, Drawings, Paintings and Prints, and Special Printed departments all maintain ephemera collections.

NationalLibrary of New Zealand (printed ephemera)

In addition to the separate divisions mentioned above, the Alexander Turnbull Library (part of the NLNZ) holds a printed ephemera collection of more than 190,000 items from the 1840s to the present.

New Zealand NavalMuseum

Included in the Naval Museum ephemera are leaflets, menus, Christmas cards, event programmes, and fleet reviews.

University ofCanterbury, MacMillan Brown Library

Canterbury maintains three separate collections of ephemera: theatre and concert programmes, art files, and general ephemera.

Sir Edmund Hillary share certificate, issued to help support the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition

 

[Guest post by Anthony Tedeschi, Rare Books Librarian, Dunedin City Library]