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.

Explore More Ephemera Collections at the Library Company of Philadelphia: guest post by Erika Piola

I am so pleased to guest post an update about the Library Company of Philadelphia’s ephemera collections first described on February 13, 2012. Thanks to the generosity of the National Endowment for the Humanities, more of our printed and graphic ephemera is now available online. Those with an interest in popular and visual culture, history of women, German-Americana, and economics now have access to near 30, 000 pieces of ephemera as well as over 7,000 representative digital files of these holdings in our catalog ImPAC.

(C) Library Company of Philadelphia

Ranging in date from circa 1720  to circa 1900, and arranged by genre and/or provenance, our newly accessible materials include early 18th-century bills of lading; amateur newspapers;  postcards, stereographs, and trade cards documenting Philadelphia cityscapes, businesses, and commercial customs; and a number of personal and professional albums and scrapbooks. Within the latter, the works of early prominent local photographers, specimens compiled by 19th-century Philadelphia printers and engravers, as well as trade cards, souvenirs, and mementos collected by socialites of the Progressive Era can be found. Other ephemera documents the Centennial Exhibition of 1876; the history of the Library Company; and the work of artist Peter Moran.

(C) Library Company of Philadelphia

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(C) Library Company of Philadelphia

  

The grant funding also facilitated the cataloging and digitization of materials given by contemporary collectors and long-term donors. The Helen Beitler Collection contains items predominantly related to 19th-century advertising, including billheads, blotters, calendars, envelopes, and labels. The collections given by William H. Helfand, a Library Company trustee emeritus and retired drug company executive, are a rich source for the history of patent medicine. The Roughwood Collection given by folklore scholar Don Yoder and William Woys Weaver document the lives of the Pennsylvania Dutch, while the Michael Zinman collections shed light on international communities through his World’s Fairs Collection, the blind community through his raised letter publications,  and the legal community through his collection of pre-1801 blank forms, such as subpoenas, deeds, and court summons.

More esoteric materials are also represented. Patrons can peruse Philadelphia amateur scientist Joseph Breintnall’s nature prints of leaves, one of our earliest acquisitions of ephemera, given to the library in 1746; circa 1895 color-printed flash cards to teach foreign languages through the Berlitz Method; as well as “Things Found in Books” from within our holdings.

Although several of the collections noted above are viewable in the digital catalog, additional and complementary records describing the materials can be further discovered in our traditional catalog WolfPAC. Through search terms representing the genre of the material, the collection or collector’s name, or the grant funder “National Endowment for the Humanities,” catalog users have another method in which to learn about the diversity of the Library Company’s ephemera collections.

I hope I have inspired a few more ephemera enthusiasts and scholars to visit our collections online (and in person). And one final note - please do not assume that a collection retrieved through a hyperlink is the only digital collection represented by the text highlighted. Please explore ImPAC. More ephemera of interest is sure to be found.

Erika Piola

Associate Curator, Prints and Photographs

The Library Company of Philadelphia

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.

Women working: trade catalogues at Harvard

Available through the Harvard University Library Open Collections Program, Women Working, 1800-1930 includes (as well as books and pamphets, diaries and memoirs, institutional records, magazines, manuscripts, and photographs) 6,000 pages of materials from from 155 trade catalogs and pamphlets from 70 companies.

©2012 The President and Fellows of Harvard College

 Dating from 1870, the trade catalogues are divided into the following subject sections:

• Beauty Products, Toiletries, and Pharmaceuticals
• Clothing
• Groceries and Recipes
• Home Appliances and Technology
• Household Goods
• Machinery
• Medicine
• Office and School Supplies
• Reading Materials
• Recreation
• Transportation

The trade catalogues are beautifully digitised in full colour. The text can be both viewed and searched (uncorrected OCR).  Related links (from individual catalogues) take the user to the full catalogue record on HOLLIS (the library catalogue for Harvard University) and to relevant external sites, where appropriate. There are also Teacher Resources, arranged by theme and a Timeline.

Women's Suffrage Banners and Ephemera from the Women's Library

For International Women's Day!

The Women's Library, formerly the Fawcett Library, is the major repository of women's suffrage material in this country. Images from these collections are available in two ways:

The VADS (Visual Arts Data Service) currently hosts 55 institutional collections (including two John Johnson Collection sections: Political Prints and Trades & Professions) which can be cross-searched or searched within individual collections. Included in the site are the Women's Library: Suffrage Banners (248 banners, including artwork) and The Women's Library Suffrage Collection.

(C) VADS and Women's Library

 

(C) Mary Evans Picture Library Ltd. and Women's Library

The latter is a taster of 67 choice images from a full range now delivered through the Mary Evans Picture Library, which hosts 2113 images from the Women's Library.  Not all are ephemera, but photographs, banners and artefacts can be excluded by confining the search to 'Illustrations only' (515 results).

Stop press: For today, the Women's Library has just mounted an online exhibition: Women and the vote.

 The Women's Library ephemera collection is not restricted to suffrage and contains much contemporary material.

More information about Women's Studies archives and resources is available through the Genesis portal, including 152 results for ephemera.

Museum of London

The Museum of London has wonderful collections of ephemera and is actively surfacing them, notably the tinsel prints, valentines, Christmas cards and trade cards.
The Collections pages enable you to read about the collections and to search (here I searched for suffrage).

(c) Museum of London

(c) Museum of London

As well as the museum's website Ellie, the Project Assistant focussing on ephemera, is blogging regularly about progress.

The Museum's commercial site has thousands of images which can be searched and ordered.

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