Ephemera articles and stories that will
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I began collecting Bitters trade cards about 40 years ago. Until then, I had been collecting Bitters bottles. What attracted me to the trade cards were their outlandish claims. Having spent much of my career as a professional salesman, I was fascinated that the Bitters manufacturers could get away…

The Abietine Medicine Company of Oroville, California was organized on May 22, 1885, for the purpose of manufacturing medicines from the resinous sap of trees known as abietine trees. Its medicines were advertised to treat the usual long laundry list of 19th century diseases, especially consumptio…

I am not a musician. I can’t read a note on a piece of sheet music. However, I have so far accumulated a collection of sheet music, ranging from 1894 to 1972, which consists of over 440 titles. It took me a while to figure out my attraction to collecting this type of ephemera, but it boi…

Crate labels are advertising art or decorative ephemera that illustrate our country’s vast agricultural history. As farming expanded across the US and went from sustaining small communities to supplying a nation, these paper labels sprang up, pasted onto the ends of stackable wooden shipping…

Jay T. Last Interview Sadly, long-time Ephemera Society member Jay T. Last recently passed away. Diane DeBlois interviewed Mr. Last at the Ephemera Society’s Annual Event in Old Greenwich CT on March 19, 2017. Jay had been awarded the Maurice Rickards medal in 2005, and in February of 2009 the So…

The Three M’s: Hollywood’s Platinum Blonde Bombshells of the 1950’s and 1960’s Marilyn Monroe Jayne Mansfield Mamie Van Doren In the 1950s and 60s, movie studios used the sex appeal of glamour girls to attract audiences to their motion pictures. In this era, a trio of peroxide-…

Sometimes a single piece of ephemera can tell a complex story, and it also shows how things that happened 150 years ago are still relevant today. This is an envelope postmarked 1884 showing Anti-Vaccination propaganda in the illustration on the front of the envelope. The image is of a Vaccinati…

Photo Credit: The Historic New Orleans Collection accession number 1996.14.1-69 Premiering on anchor.fm, a podcast reading from a handmade, 1906 photo-album. Quarantine Tour of Central America and Panama by Health Authorities as guests of The United Fruit Company was produced in response to the…

It’s August 1943 and war is raging in the Pacific. You’re aboard a U.S. Army Transport headed into action on the next island that has to be recaptured. So, you’re checking your equipment and your rifle, totally focused on the next battle, right? Wrong. On August 24, 1943 you’re being dunked by…