Ephemera articles and stories that will
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One of the pleasures of collecting ephemera is coming across details that are intriguing or surprising or revelatory or surprisingly relevant or interestingly obscure. The banner running around and through the word “DUNHAM” does something sophisticated, rarely attempted in wood engraving: emula…

Many collectors of trade cards also collect variants of certain cards, which indicate different print runs. Sometimes the word content changes, sometimes the changes are more subtle. Generally one finds but two or three variants of a given card, but some cards have more variants than that. For one…

In our modern world of iPods, CDs, internet streaming services, live concerts, NetFlix, 3-D movies, video games and a thousand other ways to be entertained, we rarely stop to realize how very different the world was in centuries past. Back in the proverbial day, infinitely less entertainment was t…

Signs on the walls of buildings are by definition ephemeral. Some may last but days, some may last decades, some may linger for a century or more, some from antiquity even remain readable after thousands of years. But eventually, each and everyone will succumb to the vicissitudes of time. Old a…

I recently won a steel engraving proof on eBay, one of the thousands of engraving proofs that have been out there for several years now following the sell-off of the archives of the American Bank Note Company (ABN). A premier securities printer since the mid-1800s (including the printing of ma…

Nineteenth-century advertisers had no need to sensationalize the dangers of fire; its threat was ever-present. Homes were heated and meals cooked on wood, coal and gas-fueled stoves. In the evening, families gathered by the light of oil or gas-burning lamps, portable versions of which were carri…

In this post, Dick Sheaff presents ephemera that points to a new business model – selling by mail. You don’t actually go to the target market yourself – you mail to it. An example of that model is The Larkin Company of Buffalo, which fine-tuned the model to a highly successful level. I guess that’…

Happy Turkey Day!

From the earliest days of our nation throughout the 19th century and beyond, barter has been a way of life in many times and places, generally when cash money was in short supply. Money was indeed in short supply at many times throughout those decades for a variety of reasons at different times…