Postcard exhibition in Boston

(C) Museum of Fine Arts, Boston www.mfa.org

 
Many thanks to John Sayers for alerting me to the exhibition The Postcard Age at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which runs until April 14 2013. Although sadly I won't see the exhibition itself, there are screen shots of it online, and I am very much looking forward to reading the accompanying book The Postcard Age by Linda Klich and Benjamin Weiss, which we now have in the Bodleian Library.

The exhibition is a taster of the 100,000 postcards which Leonard A. Lauder (son of Estée) is gradually giving to the Museum. The cards are arranged by themes such as urban life, the changing role of women, sports, celebrity, new technologies, art nouveau and WWI. 

There is an online slideshow of 10 cards from the exhibition and you can send a virtual postcard from the exhibition. I particularly like the moving images of the display (together with the other current exhibitions), which can be seen from the museum's home page.  Postcards, by virtue of their size, present challenges for display and it is good to see how the museum has approached these.


An online article from the New Yorker, The pleasures of postcards gives the background to Lauder's passion for postcards as miniature works of art.  Other online articles are Wild cards (New York Times), MFA exhibit showcases postcard marvels (Boston Post) and Cards to write home about (Wall Street Journal).

Japanese postcards from the MFA's website: www.mfa.org

Nearly 22,000 Japanese postcards from the Leonard A. Lauder Collection are already at the museum and can be seen online (most with images).

 This is a serious postcard collection, acquired over many years and representing the height of the postcard craze from the 1900s to the beginning of the First World War.  Leonard A. Lauder has collected the jewels of this age, internationally.  It is a pleasure to see these cards given the status of a museum collection, with a dedicated exhibition, and elucidated in a scholarly volume.

Seed catalogues 3: The US National Agricultural Library

The National Agricultural Library (United States Department of Agriculture) has, within its Special Collections, a major collection of seed catalogues: The Henry G. Gilbert Nursery and Seed Trade Catalog Collection. There are 200,000 catalogues, from America and a wide range of other countries (including Britain), mostly from 1890 to the present but with some dating back to the late 18th century. The image gallery presents selected covers of catalogues from the US by period (1750-1875, 1876-1900, 1901-1925) and from Japan, mostly from the Yokohama Nursery Co,. Ltd.

(C) National Agricultural Library (United States Department of Agriculture)

The Library also has a collection of posters relating to the Women's Land Army, War, Rural Electrification Administration, and the World's Poultry Congress.

Medical ephemera in the US National Library of Medicine

(C) U.S. National Library of Medicine, History of Medicine Division

 
Images from the History of Medicine (IHM) contains 69,271 images, including 7,763 posters and 4,445 postcards.These can be searched (including advanced searching) or browsed by an impressive range of categories under What, where and who. Although predominantly from the USA, these images are international with hundreds from the UK, France, China (notably Chinese anti-malaria and anti tuberculosis posters) and Switzerland.
Here today, here tomorrow: varieties of medical ephemera is the online version of a1995 exhibition of medical ephemera from the collections of William H. Helfand and the National Library of Medicine. It is arranged by theme: Addiction, Aids, Bookplates, Children, Medical education, Medical show, Public health, Tuberculosis and Women. The online version contains 140 of the original 400 items. The site also hosts separate online exhibitions of  Aids ephemera (based on an exhibition held in 2002) and Public health posters.

Ephemera and books on ephemera in the NLM collections can be found through Locator Plus.

(C) US National Library of Medicine and William H. Helfand