American Antiquarian Society update: GIGI

Since my post in January 2012, the American Antiquarian Society has launched its Digital Image Archive, called GIGI with beautifully presented tif-format thumbnails. This is in addition to other stand-alone digital projects and online exhibitions. Of particular interest to ephemerists are the 1415 broadsides (Browse and select broadsides).  A keyword search for ephemera yields 3018 results at the time of writing (of 10,000 results from a keyword search in the General Catalogue). There are links from the catalogue into GIGI where appropriate, so the advice to scholars is to start there.

All very exciting for those of us who don't have Readex and want to browse the collections of the AAS.   There is advanced searching too within GIGI.



Search for broadside in GIGI (C) American Antiquarian Society

A list of collections represented includes the following categories of ephemera:
Album cards; Billheads; Broadsides; Christmas cards; Civil War envelopes; Currency; Election Ballots; Invitations; Membership Certificates; Menus; Postcards; Ream Wrappers; Sheet Music; Trade Cards; Valentines; and Watch papers from Graphic Arts, and Trade catalogs from Books. There are also hundreds of prints.

The AAS blog also has posts about ephemera (e.g. the recent post about Irish ballads for St. Patrick's Day) and a very active Twitter account: @AmAntiquarian

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.

Ephemera at the University of Glasgow

There is an overview of Ephemera in the University of Glasgow on the Special Collections pages and a link to the Scottish Theatre Archive online catalogue which contains much material from the University of Glasgow ephemera collections. There is also a very useful introductory page to the Scottish Theatre Archive, with Flickr slide show and a list of collections included in this resource.

The Social history page describes collections of Chapbooks and Broadsides as well as named special collections including ephemera, notably Euing (temperance), Murray (broadsides, street literature, chapbooks and advertisements) and Smith.

The Ephemera of John Smith is an online exhibition by Adam McNaughton. John Smith collected ephemera received in the course of his career (bookseller, town councillor and estate owner). Initially bound in albums, it is now arranged by theme: Transport, Political, Church, Trade, Entertainment, Crime, Education, Medical, and City affairs. The ephemera relate mainly to Glasgow in the first half of the 19th century. The online exhibition shows ephemera representative of each of the themes, with explanatory text describing the item and its relationship to the collection.

Glasgow Broadside Ballads: the Murray collection is an excellent introduction to and teaching resource for ballads from collections at Glasgow, and indeed to ballads in general. There is an index to the ballads in the collection with linked images, sound files of ballads being sung, introductions to ballads and the oral tradition, publishing and selling ballads, ballad consumers and singers.

Other online resources of interest to ephemerists are: Seaside entertainment (an online exhibition of postcards) and a Flickr  featuring Victorian Christmas cards.

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

Broadsides at the National Library of Scotland

The Word on the Street is devoted to Scottish broadsides, including public notices, ballads, speeches, and crime broadsides, between 1690 and 1910. Nearly 1,800 broadsides are available as jpegs and downloadable pdfs, complete with scholarly commentaries and transcriptions (with full-text searching and hit-highlighting). All can be browsed by title or subject or searched by keyword.
There are also excellent pages introducing the background, distribution and illustration of broadsides and highlights from Crime, Ballads, Emigration, Sport, Tragedy and disaster, Marvels, and Humour.
The screen shot is of Scotch Medley, in honour of St. Andrew's Day.

National Library of Scotland © 2004

New-York Historical Society

The New-York Historical Society has just re-opened, so a good moment to blog about the Bella C. Landauer Collection of Business and Advertising Art, in which I was privileged to work for a week on an exchange with the late Wendy Shadwell some years ago.  Bella C. Landauer and John Johnson were contemporaries and knew each other. Their collections differ slightly in focus, but there is much overlap.   Ephemera comes under Graphic Collections in the N-Y H S and are described in the following terms:

The Society’s ephemera collections include lottery tickets, trade cards, billheads, tobacco labels, theater playbills and countless other types of material that were created for temporary use but have survived to illuminate everyday life and popular culture. A highlight is the Bella C. Landauer Collection of Business and Advertising Art, assembled over a forty-year period by the tireless Mrs. Landauer (1874-1960) and arranged alphabetically into 100 product categories, such as Banking, Food, Hotels, Theatrical Enterprises, and Transportation.

There are other ephemera collections too: Broadsides (catalogued), Dining Menus (mainly donated by Arnold Shircliffe) and American Board and Table games (Liman Collection).

(c) New-York Historical Society

American memory: Library of Congress

An American Time Capsule, three centuries of broadsides and other printed ephemera (Library of Congress) features a wealth of ephemera: 17,000 (of a potential 28,000) documents, with more digitisation scheduled for the future. There is a useful Introduction to ephemera, notably broadsides, reward notices, ephemera relating to anti-slavery, civil war, women, health, education, travel, industry, labor, and poetry and verse in ephemera. Full-text searching is available.

(c) Library of Congress