Winterthur ephemera collections

The Winterthur Museum holds several important collections of ephemera, including the recently acquired John and Carolyn Grossman Collection, which has 250,000 items documenting lithography and chromolithography and the Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, a guide to which can be downloaded. The Winterthur Digitised Collections page contains selections of images and introductions to the collections. Apart from the Grossman Collection, notable for ephemerists are:  cigar labels, bookplates, Shaker postcards (and photographs), the Charles Magnus Collection (lithographer), mathematical playing cards (Thomas Tuttell Collection), French candy wrappers, lantern slides, indentures, and the Maxine Waldron Collection of Children's Books and Paper Toys. You can search and browse the library digital collections (including advanced searching) and the undigitised collections, through the library catalogue. You can also subscribe to RSS feeds for updates on each collection and follow Winterthur on Facebook.

© 2009 Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library

There is much to explore, including attractive research guides, a downloadable guide, and online exhibitions.

© 2009 Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library

Louis Prang at the New York Public Library

Among the collections represented in the New York Public Library's Digital Gallery are Publishers' Proofs and Related Work from L. Prang & Company.  23 albums are digitised (17 of chromolithographs of publishers' proofs and 6 of advertising cards of Prang and other companies). Not only is this a wonderful resource of material relating to Louis Prang, one of the most celebrated American chromolithographers, but these are also fascinating examples of stock books and include annotations and progressives, such as Prang's prize babies (screen shot). A treasure-trove for social and printing historians.

(C) New York Public Library

Trade catalogues at the V&A and Manchester Metropolitan University Library

The Victoria and Albert Museum is one of the few British institutions to have collected (and to continue to collect) trade catalogues. Often falling between books and ephemera, these fascinating documents are rare.  The trade catalogues, which date from the 1760s to the present, are split between the National Art Library (Jobbing Printing and EKCO collections) and the Archive of Art and Design (Liberty, Heal and others from within archive collections). These collections are not digitised. Readers' tickets and appointments are required.

Another major British collection of trade catalogues is held at Manchester Metropolitan University Library, where an exhibition was held in 1992 with a catalogue by Gaye Smith: Trade Catalogues: A Hundred Years, 1850-1949  (Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University Library, 1992).

(C) V&A

French Trade Cards at Waddesdon Manor

At Waddesdon Manor are three volumes of exquisite mainly French trade cards and a fourth volume of mainly German material, including prints relating to human prodigies. This material was acquired by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild in 1891. These date-span of the material is early 17th to early 19th centuries.  The majority of the trade cards are high-quality 18th century engravings.
The material is catalogued, digitised and searchable in a number of sophisticated ways. It is also translated into English.

© 2005 WADDESDON MANOR

The Warwick Eighteenth Century Centre has a research site: Selling consumption in the Eighteenth Century: Advertising and the Trade Card, which specifically discusses the German material in the fourth volume and has a very useful bibliography of articles about the Waddesdon cards and trade cards more generally.

The Ephemera Society of America

The Ephemera Society of America was founded in 1980.  Its focus is an annual convention which combines a conference and fair, usually in March. The society publishes The Ephemera Journal three times a year, communicates with its members through eNews, ( a monthly electronic journal) and has published some major reference works on ephemera. It has an excellent and informative web presence, including illustrated sections defining types of ephemera, articles, links, and bibliographies.  It is also on Facebook and Twitter: @EphemeraSociety

© 2011 The Ephemera Society of America

Online Advent Calendars

I really like the online 'advent' calendars launched today, especially those of the Geffrye Museum, Oxford University Computing Services Open Advent calendar (24 open educational resources free to use, not just for Christmas) and the Regional Support Centre South East 'Appy Christmas calendar, which introduces educational apps, gadgets and tips.

©Geffrye Museum

 

My favourite so far is the University of Glasgow House of Fraser Archive Advent Calendar, which reveals a new Christmas image from the archive each day in a countdown to the launch of the online catalogue after Christmas Day. A fun way to introduce a new resource which, judging from the first image, will contain a lot of ephemera.

© UofG

British Newspaper Archive: British Library

The new British Newspaper Archive is a wonderful resource not only in itself, but also for contextualising and dating ephemera. .Functionality is superb, with browsing, searching, filtering of results, interactive map, highlights, facility to save search results to a personal workspace, etc. Searching is free and you see thumbnails of your results, but outside the British Library a subscription is necessary to see the full images.

© brightsolid Newspaper Archive Limited 2011