Board Games: the British Museum and the current exhibition at Waddesdon Manor

730 board games from the British Museum's collection are online. Many are from the bequest of Lady Charlotte Schreiber, (who also collected fans and playing cards). I focussed first on those from 1790-1800 (103 of them: British, continental and oriental) and then on the 45 Game of the Goose (see screen shot). All have excellent images and metadata.

(C) Trustees of the British Museum

There is currently an exhibition of French 18th century board games at Waddesdon Manor: Playing, learning, flirting: printed board games from eighteenth century France at Waddesdon Manor.  The games (mainly Le Jeu de l'Oie, the Game of the Goose, and its variations)  have also been recently catalogued but are not yet online. Several are exquisitely hand-coloured. The exhibition runs until October 28th 2012, with study sessions on July 20 and September 21.  There is an article on the collection and exhibition by curator Rachel Jacobs in the Summer 2012 edition of The Ephemerist.

(C) Waddesdon Manor

Canada in the First and Second World Wars

A new (bliingual) site: Wartime Canada uses ephemera as a 'window into the Canadian experience during the world wars'. This collaborative project states that the 'emphasis is on the kind of material that is usually regarded as disposable – the very material that was omnipresent in the lives of Canadians in wartime'.

Each of the main subjects (Eating, Fighting, Learning, Relaxing, Remembering, Returning, Shopping, Volunteering, Working, and Worshipping) is broken down into sub-themes, with illustrations and metadata. Only ten per cent of the content is yet online, with approximately 5,000 items still to be uploaded, so this is a site to keep re-visiting.

Lesson plans are provided for a range of themes, such as War effort, Government & economy, Identity & culture, and Society.

Wartime Canada can be followed on Twitter: @WartimeCA

© 2012 · Wartime Canada

Monash University Library

I read about ephemera at Monash University Library in a hard copy of their Recent Acquisitions 6, passed to me by a colleague. This can also be downloaded as a pdf or viewed as a virtual exhibition.  The Library exhibits its recent acquistions every two or three years. The current exhibition (8 December 2011 - 5 March 2012) includes ephemera, such as games, children's scrap books, rock posters, souvenirs and guides, exhibition guides, catalogues, an Olympic Games programme for 1932, and a broadside from 1841.

(C) 2011 Monash University

 
In exploring their website further I was excited to find a whole exhibition from 2006-07: Ephemera, with pdf catalogue and virtual exhibition. Richard Overell, Head of Rare Books (who mentions the John Johnson Collection in the foreword) explains that Monash University Library has been collecting ephemera since the 1990s to support research by social historians. Although many of their ephemera are recent, the collection impressively contains English pamphlets and broadsides from the late 17th century onwards. The catalogue is full of information about ephemera and the provenance of the material in Monash's collection and is beautifully illustrated with samples of the collection.

The introduction to the catalogue takes the form of a very interesting essay on the nature of ephemera The evidence that history forgot by Prof Graeme Davison.

(C) 2011 Monash University

French Trade Cards at Waddesdon Manor

At Waddesdon Manor are three volumes of exquisite mainly French trade cards and a fourth volume of mainly German material, including prints relating to human prodigies. This material was acquired by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild in 1891. These date-span of the material is early 17th to early 19th centuries.  The majority of the trade cards are high-quality 18th century engravings.
The material is catalogued, digitised and searchable in a number of sophisticated ways. It is also translated into English.

© 2005 WADDESDON MANOR

The Warwick Eighteenth Century Centre has a research site: Selling consumption in the Eighteenth Century: Advertising and the Trade Card, which specifically discusses the German material in the fourth volume and has a very useful bibliography of articles about the Waddesdon cards and trade cards more generally.