Exhibitions (2): Transatlantiques at the Musée de l'mprimerie de Lyon

In April, I was privileged to go to the opening of Transatlantiques: l'épopée graphique des paquebots de légende at the Musée de l'Imprimerie in Lyon. Dr Alan Marshall, director of the museum, has been a staunch advocate of ephemera for many years. His 2001 exhibition, Ephemera: les imprimés de tous les jours 1880-1939 was a trail-blazer and introduced a dazzling display of ephemera to the public mainly through four printers'archives: those of Imprimeries Audin, Gougenheim, Perreyon (all of Lyon), and A. Waton (St. Etienne). The excellent catalogue is still available at the museum.   Alan followed this (in terms of ephemera) with Couleurs, les prouesses de la chromolithographie, an exhibition curated by Prof.. Michael Twyman, world expert in lithography and ephemera.  Furthermore, the permanent displays of the museum include many examples of ephemera. These are, of course, a selection from very rich research collections.

Transatlantiques runs from Wednesday to Sunday until 1 September 2013 and is co-curated by Clémence Ducroix  and Alan Marshall. The exhibits are not from the museum's own collections but from l'Association French Lines, Le Havre, of which Mme Ducroix is the archivist.

Poster by Jan Auvigne. (C) Association French Lines

 An exhibition of ocean liner ephemera in Lyon?  The connection is not the sea, but printing. The stunning display of prints, forms, menus, brochures, leaflets, ships newspapers, posters, tickets, labels, wrappers and all sorts of promotional material shows what printing was necessitated by the running of transatlantic boats, ships and liners.  Through this angle, we begin to comprehend just how much was required to administer and promote these complicated companies.  Much was printed on shore, some on board, and there are large images of both printing operations.

The catalogue is co-authored by the curators and documents the history of the Compagnie Générale  Transatlantique, and the emergence of graphic art.for publicity.

Another exhibition of collections from l'Association French Lines has just opened in Evian. Légendes des mers. L'art de vivre à bord des paquebots runs from15 June to 22 September 2013.

The French Lines archive is currently being catalogued. On the website, there is a list of the main categories and also sample images.

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

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.

Games People Play exhibition

A selection from Adrian Seville's collection of printed board games is on display at Haldon Forest Park, near Exeter, at the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World. The exhibition (part of the Cultural Olympiad) is titled Games people play and  runs until September 30.

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

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

Railway posters at the National Railway Museum

The National Railway Museum in York has put 10,707 records for its posters online, many with associated digitial images. These can be filtered by railway company or cross-searched with other material through the search box on the Collections page. The screen shot shows a results for National Caledonian Railway.

C) National Railway Musuem

There are also 4,444 catalogued entries (not all digitised) associated with Using the railways (postcards, tickets, passes, labels, toys, etc) which can be limited by category and railway.

Users are invited to upload their own images to a Flickr site associated with the Museum.

There is also a fasinating blog about the work of the Museum -  from library and archive collections, to railway vehicle collections or conservation. I particularly enjoyed reading the blog by Lorna Frost about the conservation of paintings for the recent Art in Advertising exhibition.

The Museum is represented on many social media: YouTube, Twitter, Flicker, Facebook and Delicious.

The National Archive Image Library

The National Archive Image Library is a commercial image service, but also offers a glimpse of ephemera and other images from the National Archive's vast collections. The images are divided into the following categories: Buildings and factories, Colonial and empire, Crime, Design, Entertainment and theatre, Events and exhibitions, First World War, Mamuscripts, Maps, Medical, Military, Mining, People, Piracy, Places, Politics, Second World War, Slavery, Transport and Travel, and Victoriana.

(C) National Archives

There are also Monthly showcases which take a seasonal or topical theme, to date:  New Year, Winter, War and National Savings, Queens and Crowns, London, Seaside, Sports, Titanic, Creative Images, and Festival of Britain.

(C) The National Archives

Further images, mainly photographic but including some ephemera, are available copyright-free through The National Archives UK's Photostream on Flickr.  These have been tagged. The screen shot shows images relating to Christmas.

Cornell University: Games and other ephemera

Pastimes and Paradigms: games we play is an online exhibition (from 2004), documenting the evolution of games through material from the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University.  Many historic board games are online, together with card games, jigsaws, puzzles, and prints showing children at play.  There are some nice animations too.

Copyright © 2004 Division of Rare & Manuscript Collections

The Rare and Manuscript Collections pages reveal digital collections of political Americana and Food, wine and culinary history resources (from the Nestlé library), including 10,000 restaurant menus from 1850s to the present. There is much more to explore: Search Cornell reveals 171 hits for ephemera, including theatre ephemera, posters, scrapbooks, broadsides and much else. All tantalising!

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