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Publications
Ephemera News
The Ephemera Society began issuing Ephemera News in 1981
to stay in touch with members, to offer news of current events,
to publicize new publications, to feature member profiles, and to
publish articles on topics that were of interest to members. Read more >>
Early issues of Ephemera News are out of print, but are available
in photocopy form for $2.00. More recent issues are available for
purchase for $4.00 plus $1.50 for postage. Contact the Society for more information.
Index of Ephemera News
This complete online Index of Ephemera
News lists more than 1,100 entries, some of
them containing dozens of individual references. Two separate reference
listings follow the Index on this page—a bibliography of Book Reviews that have appeared in Ephemera
News and a complete listing of Advertisers.
A photocopy of all three sections—Index, Book Reviews, and Advertisers—may be purchased for $20 including postage. Make check
payable to Ephemera Society and mail to ESA, PO Box 95, Cazenovia, NY 13035 or visit the online store >>. You can also access a PDF version of the Index here >>
The Ephemera Journal
This issue of the The Ephemera Journal XII has three very different articles that, as serendipity would have it, include some common themes.
Gejus van Diggele, a collector from The Netherlands, has amassed some 3,000 antiquarian playing cards whose second lives, as receipts, promissory notes, clothing reinforcement, even heart-wrenching notes from destitute mothers forced to abandon their infants, are far more interesting than their first. Van Diggele is more than a collector, however. He is driven to know the background of each playing card, and, if it can be determined, the circumstances of those who chose (or were forced) to reuse an abandoned ace or a discarded deuce. He digs with the tenacity of a TV detective waiting for the Eureka! moment.
Among the treasures of Washington, D.C.’s Folger Shakespeare Library, Curator Erin Blake, Ph.D., is building an important collection of paper ephemera with Shakespearean themes. Images include a bicycle ad featuring the Bard as well as a Shakespearean-themed book whose spine was reinforced by (you guessed it) old playing cards.
From the beginning Dr. Blake faced the same conundrum encountered by many other institutional curators presented with orphaned scraps of paper that defied easy classification. Step by step she has devised ways in which the library’s ephemera can be found and used. Along the way she has boosted the status of the collection among her fellow curators and scholars.
Also in this issue, Nancy Rosin documents the innate human desire to chronicle the events of our lives in scrapbooks ranging from simple Commonplace books to elaborate, color-filled masterpieces of the mid-19th century. But what’s the connection here? Shakespeare, Rosin says, was a “scrapbooker” himself. Although she has no Shakespeare scrapbooks in her collection, she does have hundreds of others that illustrate creative ways in which we capture both the important and inane moments we’ve chosen to pass along to future generations.
As a sidebar to these lovingly crafted scrapbooks is John Grossman’s 41-pound opus whose chromolithographed bits and pieces mark the Jubilee of Queen Victoria. All we need now is a bookish detective willing to retrace the collector’s lineage.
– Eric Johnson, Editor |
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Ephemera
Journal, Volume I |
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Ephemera Journal, Volume
V |
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Ephemera Journal, Volume
IX |
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Ephemera Journal, Volume
II |
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Ephemera Journal, Volume
VI |
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Ephemera Journal, Volume X |
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Ephemera Journal, Volume
III |
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Ephemera Journal, Volume
VII |
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Ephemera Journal, Volume
XI |
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Ephemera Journal, Volume
IV |
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Ephemera Journal, Volume
VIII |
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Ephemera Journal, Volume
XII |
Other Publications
The Encyclopedia
of Ephemera: A Guide to the Fragmentary Documents of Everyday
Life for the Collector, Curator, and Historian by Maurice Rickards, edited by Michael Twyman
Cameo
Cards & Bella C. Landauer: A Monograph of the Ephemera Society of
America, 1992
The Before
and After Trade Card by Ben Crane
An Atlantic
Telegraph by Robert Dalton Harris & Diane DeBlois
Rewards
Of Merit by Patricia Fenn & Alfred P. Malpa |