Ephemera articles and stories that will
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Despite its featherweight, printed paper from the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art exerted enough power back in the 1880s to ignite and sustain enthusiastic public interest in a beloved 13,000-pound curiosity named Jumbo. Circus paper encompasses a wide range of material such as tickets,…

The Ephemera Society’s 2017 conference was entitled “AMERICAN INGENUITY: What’s The Big Idea?” The advances of “this American experiment” have always been dependent upon native inventiveness, and the conference will explore various aspects of American creativity. Our nation went from a rural agr…

Cagney actually never spoke that line famously attributed to him, but no matter. Millions of others have said it. Though rats are said to actually make very nice pets, most people find them repulsive. Mankind has fought a losing bat with the rat populations of the world since Time immemorial. Mu…

The 19th century Industrial Revolution brought to the world a host of seemingly miraculous advances . . . photography, color printing, the X-ray, automobiles and a lengthy list of other advances. One of these was a device which could send one’s voice anywhere and everywhere: the telephone…

Songwriter Neil Young, like many of us, grew up during intense worldwide fascination with rockets and satellites and space-ship-thinking in the 1950s and 1960s. Space travel fantasy had become quite popular in the United States in the 1930s with the exploits of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, and …

The Eiffel Tower in Paris celebrated its 125th anniversary in 2014. Built in 1889, the Eiffel Tower served as the entryway arch and, at over 1,000 feet tall, the centerpiece of the 1889 World’s Fair. It remains to this day an immensely popular tourist attraction. The Liebig company put out a …

Not All Printed Ephemera Is On Paper by John Sayers Not all printed ephemera is on paper. And not all ephemera is pretty. But the ‘story’ behind the ephemera can sometimes transcend any departures from the norm. This promotional leather-trimmed cloth ‘wallet’ created by the legendary White Star…

The engraving of social stationery has long been a small but vital industry originating in Western Europe and subsequently practiced in the Americas and in the more affluent countries of the far East. Social stationery played a symbolic role in the literature of socially conscious writers such …

On the eve of the Great War, in 1914, a clever Swiss businessman invented and manufactured a “Posttaxenschieber” — an ingenious sliding scale that could calculate the cost of every form of communication available. The device was patented, was available at Huber’s shop on Tödistrasse in Zurich, …