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

Australasian Ephemera - Part 2: Australia. Guest post by Anthony Tedeschi

Very many thanks to Anthony Tedeschi for his second post about Australasian ephemera and to Richard Overell of Monash University for supplying images from their collections. Anthony's own blog: Antipodean Footnotes gives fascinating insights into rare books and special collections in New Zealand and Australia.

Australasian Ephemera Collections – Part 2: Australia

Following on from my guest post in October on New Zealand ephemera collections, the second of this two-part post highlights some of the ephemera collections held by Australian institutions. Like the New Zealand post it is hoped additions will be made by way of comments.

For details on the various subject categories collected, it is suggested interested readers consult each institution’s on-line catalogue (subject search ‘ephemera’). A Directory of Australian Ephemera Collections was published by the State Library of New South Wales in 1992. An Index, compiled by the State Library of Victoria, was published the following year.

(C) Monash University: special collections

Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Studies

The AIATSIS began collecting ephemera in the 1970s. Starting out with a focus on print material, the collection has grown to include non-paper items, such as badges, t-shirts, and tea towels. The largest sequence in the collection is comprised of invitations to openings of Indigenous art exhibitions from across Australia.

A PDF summary of the collection and index to the ephemera categories is available (see link above).

Australian War Memorial

The AWM finding aids page includes links to multiple guides from aerial photographs and card, certificates and leaflets, to private records and film and sound. Though many of the guides pertain to ephemeral material, such as the Guide to the Cigarette & Trade Card Collection, under the specifically named ‘Ephemera (includes cards, certificates, leaflets, postcards and souvenirs)’ heading are listed: British Commonwealth Occupation Force Souvenirs Collection, Souvenirs 15, the Korean Collection, the Vietnam Collection, the Gulf War Collection, the East Timor Collection, the Iraq 2003 Collection, and the Afghanistan Collection.

Monash University Library 

(C) Monash University: special collections

Monash University special collections have been acquiring ephemera since the 1990s. Material in the collection dates from late seventeenth-century English pamphlets and broadsides to current menus, games, souvenirs, posters, flyers, cards, and junk mail. In 2011, the library hosted an exhibition called Ephemera, with a catalogue (PDF) and on-line version providing an overview of its rich holdings.

The Monash collection featured on the John Johnson Collection’s Ephemera Resources blog on 6 February 2012.

(C) Monash University: special collections

National Library of Australia

Australia’s national library has been collecting ephemera relevant to the nation since the 1960s. The Australian ephemera is indexed and divided into seven themes by subject: Australian performing arts programmes and ephemera (PROMPT), formed collections, general ephemera, geography and travel, programmes and invitations, scrapbooks, and trade catalogues. While the NLA collects widely, it aims to acquire as much Federal election campaign material and material relating to national events as possible. In 2007, the NLA received the oldest example of Australian printing – the 1796 ‘Jane Shore playbill’ – as a gift from the Canadian government.

The NLA maintains a General Ephemera Collection Thesaurus (PDF). Readers might also be interested in the Library’s database Trove, which includes a number of ephemera related resources and collections listed among its contents from across Australia, some of which, such as the Federation Ephemera at the State Library of New South Wales project, are freely available on-line.

Visitors can browse the ephemera collection and read the Library’s ephemera collection development policy. The Library’s ‘Behind the Scenes’ blog has also recently added two posts on ‘canvassing election ephemera in the Pacific’ (Part 1 and Part 2).

 

State Library of New South Wales

Between the Mitchell and State Reference libraries, the SLNSW holds a diverse collection of ephemera, which includes some of the earliest examples in Australia. Among the individual pieces highlighted on the Library’s website are: a 1612 Dutch translation of the de Quiros pamphlet, which contains the earliest printed reference to the word ‘Australia’, a broadside ca. 1789 describing a wild man or monstrous plant brought from Botany Bay, a playbill dated 8 March 1800, propaganda leaflets dropped by a Turkish aeroplane at Gallipoli during World War I, and an album of invitations, menus and other ephemeral printing related to the Inauguration of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901.

Among the subjects highlighted on-line are collections related to Qantas airline, which includes material from the 1920s to the present day, and on horse racing.

State Library of Queensland

The John Oxley Library of the State Library of Queensland notes calendars, elections, exhibitions and festivals, invitations, menus, royalty and royal visits, sport, and trade programmes among the categories of material which it collections. The strongest sequence in the collection is the Library’s theatre programmes, which date from 1866 to the present day.

The John Oxley Library blog uploaded two helpful posts (available on the same page) describing its theatre ephemera and how to search the ephemera collection in the Library catalogue.

State Library of South Australia

Material in the State Library of South Australia’s ephemera collection dates from 1836 onwards, and includes material similar in nature to many other institutions, from badges and business cards, to greeting cards and sheet music. The library, however, also holds a unique collection of wine labels. Collected since 1972, there are approximately 10,000 labels in the collection, reflecting the state’s connection to the Australian wine industry. A description of the collection can be found on the ephemera guide page (see link above), and two hundred and fifty labels have been digitised and are available through the Library’s Wine Literature of the World website.

State Library of Victoria

Centred on ‘Victoria and Victorians’, but including material from across the country as well, the State Library of Victoria holds one of the largest ephemera collections in Australia. Material dates from the 1850s onwards. In addition to the types of ephemeral material held by other institutions, the SLVA is busy building a collection of local zines to document Melbourne’s thriving art and music scenes.

Three of the library’s major ephemera collections – advertising, political ephemera, and theatre programmes – have individual descriptions. Some examples from the Library’s ephemera collection have been digitised, such as the fan-shaped programme for the play School for Scandal (Melbourne, 1869) and the 1935 Myer Mail Order Shoppers’ Guide for Autumn & Winter. There is also a research guide to the Library’s Political Ephemera Poster Collection. A number of the posters have also been digitised and are available on-line.

State Library of Western Australia

The SLWA ephemera collection numbers over 100,000 items. The library maintains a selection of highlights from its ephemera collection on topics such as ships and shipwrecks in Western Australia, royal visits, firms and businesses, the Festival of Perth, and a collection of tombstone inscriptions gathered from Western Australian cemeteries. There is also a page dedicated to finding Indigenous ephemera.

University of Queensland

While I could not find a general summary of its ephemera collection, the University of Queensland Fryer Library has highlighted some aspects of the collection, such as political ephemera and material marking Queensland statehood, as part of its Treasure of the Month on-line exhibition series.

New Zealand Update: Auckland City Library Ephemera Collection

Part of the Sir George Grey Special Collections, the ACL Ephemera Collection includes material from the 1840s onwards divided into three distinct collections: the Old Colonists’ Museum Collection (material on Auckland’s colonial period given to the library when the OCM closed in the 1950s), the Freida Dickens Programme Collection (music, dance and theatre programmes, 1911-1976), and the New Zealand Ephemera Collection, which is divided into two sequences based on type and subject matter respectively (material includes menus, tickets, advertising flyers, cards and calendars).

The library maintains a searchable ephemera index database.

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Wishing everyone Happy Holidays and a joyous New Year from the Antipodes!

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

Patent Medicines at Hagley Museum and Library

The Patent Medicine online exhibition (Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE) is designed to show a small portion of their holdings of Patent Medicine material. The exhibition is divided into Almanacs, Photographs, Advertising, Trade Catalogs, and Manuscripts, and has sections on the History of Patent Medicine and Advertising and Branding.

There are links from the exhibition to Hagley Digital Archives, which provides larger images, some metadata and the facility to purchase images. Users can also add tags and comments.  I will return to Hagley Digital Archives in a future post.

(Hagley Museum and Library)

Seed catalogues 1: Oregon State University Libraries

It is National Gardening Week, and this seems a very good time to focus on seed catalogues.

Oregon State University Libraries Special Collections has a very useful and well presented online exhibit on early seed catalogues, based on the collection assembled by the former agricultural librarian, Laura Kelts. There are over 2,000 items in the collection, from 1832 to 1966, which include seed catalogues from Great Britain, Holland and other European and Asian countries, as well as (predominantly) North America. The holdings are particularly strong in North American catalogues of the 1940s.

The website gives the history of both British and American seed catalogues. It is divided into pages on the Earliest European seed and nursery catalogues, Early 19th century catalogues (with separate pages for British and American catalogues, Mid 19th century,  Late 19th and early 20th century, World War I, 1920s, 1930s, World War II and 1945-1960.  The appendices are devoted to Art and photography in seed catalogues and, perhaps most useful of all, there is an excellent page of links to other collections and exhibits, mostly in the USA, but also in Britain, Holland and Canada and introducing the Lindley Library (Royal Horticultural Society) project to locate all European seed catalogues, and a separate Bibliography.  Which is why I have called this Seed catalogues I: there is much more to explore!

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

Smithsonian Institution Libraries online exhibition finder

The Smithsonian Libraries' Library and Archival Exhibitions on the Web is an invaluable tool. Unsurprisingly, I keyed in Ephemera and got over 150 hits, which I look forward to exploring at leisure, mainly from the USA but including some from the United Kingdom, Austalia and Canada. At a time when there are more and more exhibitions, real or virtual, being put online, it is good to have a facility to search them by subject.  Users are invited to suggest additions.

(C) Smithsonian Libraries

American Antiquarian Society

The American Antiquarian Society is a major repository for American ephemera, notably early material, outlined in the excellent online Guide to ephemera.  A major digitial resource is only available by subscription: American Broadsides and Ephemera, Series I, 1760-1900 (Readex Division of NewsBank).

There is much else to explore in the AAS website.

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(C) American Antiquarian Society

 
The Guide to the Collections gives an overview in two columns: one by subject grouping, the other alphabetical, with icons showing which have been digitised. Links lead to a series of web pages introducing the category and outlining the resources at the AAS.

There is a very useful genre listing, which gives the cataloguing and listing status of each category.  From this, those which are of most interest to ephemerists are: Almanacs, Billheads, Bookplates and booksellers' labels, Booksellers' catalogues, Broadsides, Calendars, Calling card, Canadiana, Cartes de visite, Civil war cartoons, Civil war envelopes, Clipper ship cards, Election ballots, Ephemera, Games, Invitations, Lottery tickets, Menus, Paul Revere Collection, Postcards, Printing and publishing history, Rewards of merit, Sentiment cards, Songsters, Textile printing, Trade cards, Trade catalogues, although there is clearly more ephemera kept under subject.   Of these, almanacs, booksellers' catalogues, broadsides, Canadiana, printing and publishing history, songsters, and trade catalogues are partially catalogued.  Priority has been given to early material.  The online catalogue, which includes many records for ephemera, can be searched by genre as well as keyword, subject, name, etc.

Some collections have been digitised and are available online in the form of Illustrated inventories. The important  Paul Revere Collection contains 18th century trade cards, certificates, masonic ephemera, prints and much else, all described and digitsed in an Illustrated Inventory.  There are also subject tags, a searchable pdf, list of resources and thumbnail gallery (shown in screen shot).

(C) American Antiquarian Society

The Charles Peirce Collection of Social and Political Caricatures and Ballads is also fully digitised and is also notable for its interractive view of the album before it was disassembled. These political cartoons are supplemented by The European Political Print Collection.  Ambrotypes and daguerrotypes also have fully illustrated inventories.

The AAS holds an important archive of McLoughlin Bros. catalogues, price lists and order forms, available as full-colour pdfs, and also some 50 volumes of Louis Prang's salesmen's books featuring greetings cards.

There is also an invaluable 19th century American Children's Book Trade Directory.

Online exhibitions include Big Business Food Production, Making Valentines, Visions of Christmas, and A Woman's Work is Never Done, all of which feature ephemera.

American Trade Cards at Harvard

The American definition of trade card is slightly different to the English one, so these are not engraved or lithographed business cards but rather colourful, mainly chromolithographed, advertisements. 1,000 of 8,000 19th century trade cards from the Baker Library (at the Bloomberg Center, Harvard Business School) have been catalogued as part of the Harvard University Library's Digital Initiative.
Catalogue records and images can be seen through the Visual Information Access catalogue, VIA.
There is also an online exhibition from 2000: An new and wonderful invention: the nineteenth-century American trade card.

Copyright 2004 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

Copyright 2004 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

Posters in the London Transport Museum

The London Transport Museum site is a major source of 20th century posters, which were used on the Underground or on  buses. Commissioned by Frank Pick from 1908 onwards from leading and avant-garde artists of the day, these posters caused the Underground to be dubbed 'the world's longest art gallery.'  The posters advertised London attractions and events, accessible by Underground or bus. They are all online, and searchable by theme, artist, date, and colour.  There are also online essays and an online exhibition.  The screen shot shows some of the results of a search for Christmas, with posters encouraging people to shop early, go to the theatre, make room for other passengers, or just wishing customers a Happy Christmas.

©2010 London Transport Museum & Transport for London