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Ephemera 22
The society's twenty-second annual conference and fair will be
held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Greenwich, Connecticut, over St.
Patrick's Day weekend, March 15-17, 2002. Our new fair managers
will be Flamingo Promotions, owned and operated by society members
Tina and John Bruno. Check out the Flamingo web site for details
about the Ephemera 22 fair at http://www.flamingoshows.com/.
The conference will feature six speakers. Four are scheduled on
Friday, March 15th, and two on Sunday, the 17th.
Leading off Friday's program will be Lois Densky-Wolff with a talk
entitled "Mark Me Well: Bookmarks, Pagemarkers, and Bookmark
Ephemera." Lois enthusiastically notes that in the world of
ephemera and antique "smalls" nothing beats collecting
bookmarks and pagemarkers showing advertising art and other images.
She became fascinated with them on a trip to London in the late
1980s when she bought her first paper bookmark at the English ephemera
society's annual show. Hooked ever since, Lois will present a survey
of this particular type of ephemera using examples from her own
collection to illustrate her talk. Lois, an archivist and librarian,
is currently head of the University Libraries-Special Collections
Department at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.
She contributed the bookmark page to the society's web site - http://www.ephemerasociety.org/ex-bookmarks.html.
Jon Williams follows Lois on Friday morning to speak about the
collection of ephemera that he administers at the Hagley
Museum and Library, just outside Wilmington, Delaware. As Andrew
W. Mellon Curator of Prints and Photographs, Jon oversees ephemera
documenting the history of American business, technology, and consumerism,
topics that mirror the strengths of his library. Items under his
care range from ephemera issued by the Dupont Company to paper dolls
documenting Miss America pageants, from posters covering workplace
safety to the ephemera of world's fairs where the latest technology
was on display. Hagley's growing trade card collection, numbering
about 3,500, shows business transactions of all kinds; its postcards
illustrate mills, factories, and railroad stations; and its letterheads
and billheads document hardware stores. Other forms of paper ephemera
at Hagley include salesperson's samples, poster stamps, and napkins
bearing the names of businesses.
After a break for lunch Gino Francesconi will speak about the development
of the Carnegie
Hall archives, a collection that he established with a mere
three small boxes of material in 1986. By the time the hall celebrated
its centennial in 1990-1991, so much had been assembled that Gino
was able to curate exhibitions around New York City and start a
museum, which was launched with a Tchaikovsky exhibit one hundred
years to the day after the maestro had arrived in the United States
to open Carnegie Hall. This show led to nine more temporary exhibitions,
all of which displayed manuscripts never before shown in the country,
including seventeen piano sonatas by Ludwig van Beethoven. The Carnegie
Hall archive is a rich resource for the study and appreciation of
the performing arts, and it includes such ephemera as posters, programs,
manuscripts, and scrapbooks.
Bruce Connor, a member of the society's board of directors, will
conclude Friday's presentations. As a life long resident of Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, Bruce has had the opportunity of being surrounded
by the early history of our country. His eclectic range of interests
include anti-slavery movements, nineteenth century advertising,
trade cards, and the department store founder Jon Wanamaker. Bruce's
talk will center on the life and achievements of Wanamaker in the
retail trade, mostly before 1923.
Sunday's session will begin with a glimpse of what twenty-first
century technology promises. Scott Weimer, Account Executive for
Imaging Solutions at VTLS, a library technology and services firm
in Blacksburg, Virginia, has entitled his talk "Out of the
Box and onto the World Wide Web: Considerations for Digitizing Ephemera."
Attendees will come away with an understanding of the issues and
choices that surround digital imaging projects. Scott will discuss
alternatives in making ephemera available on the Internet, planning
a project, workflow considerations, and end user designs. Two of
VTLS's Internet projects are the Library of Virginia Digital Library
Program at http://www.lva.lib.va.us/dlp/index.htm
and the Greater Cincinnati Memory Project at http://memory.gclc-lib.org/.
Concluding the conference is Barry Friedman, producer of the television
program "Treasures in Your Home: The World of Collecting."
Barry has been collecting for over thirty years and is best known
for his passion about items associated with Charles Lindbergh. His
presentation will be illustrated by such pieces of ephemera as Lindbergh's
last payroll check as an airmail pilot, the bill for the instrument
panel of the "Spirit of St. Louis," the invoice for the
lettering of the plane, and Lindbergh's handwritten countdown checklist
for the maiden flight of the "Spirit of St. Louis" when
he tested the plane prior to his famous flight in 1927 from New
York to Paris.
We look forward to seeing you in Greenwich in March!
E. Richard McKinstry
President
[This article originally appeared in the Northeast
Journal of Antiques & Art.]
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