Ephemera articles and stories that will
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I have come to look at many collecting areas as parts of a cohesive whole, rather than a list of separate specialties such as stamps, covers, trade cards, letterheads, cancellations, postal history, greeting cards, revenues on a document, etc. It is, in reality, a universe of intersecting intere…

In “The Artist’s Garden: American Impressionism and the Garden Movement, 1887–1920”—the exhibition on view in The Huntington’s MaryLou and George Boone Gallery through May 9—you can catch a glimpse of a 19th-century innovation that brightened the visual culture of the age: color lithography, or …

Trade cards were a late 19th century phenomenon, and postcards were an early 20th century craze. In the period from, say, 1890 to 1910, all sorts of interesting transitions occurred as businesses moved away from advertising trade cards to advertising postcards. One interesting aspect was that so…

One prized acquisition at the recent Ephemera Society conference and fair in Greenwich was a trade card, apparently, made of wood! Produced by the Ornamental Wood Manufacturing Company of Bridgeport, CT, bearing a patent date of October 18, 1865, it measures @4 1/4” x 2 3/4”, and is @ 1/4“ thick…

The humble small, vintage business card . . . often type only, often printed letterpress, often on coated stock, is an easily overlooked source of rich tidbits of primary source information. Here are a few . . . the careful reader may find a number of new things to ponder about the lives of our …

Though both my father and his father worked for the Boston & Maine Railroad for their entire careers, I’ve never been especially interested in trains. (Though when, as a boy, I got to actually drive a steam engine for a short distance in the Charlestown, MA yards, and a few years later likew…

Here is a blog post base on a presentation on an “Old Glory” booklet which I wrote and designed, and was put out by the U.S. Postal Service in 2003. It contained 20 postage stamps, it was entirely ephemera-based and a fun project. I have been asked to post it to this Ephemera Society web…

This ephemera world of ours is just chock-full of interesting stuff. Here are some things I’ve recently come across. A simple little diecut label, yet printed letterpress in three colors, on a coated stock. I always loved this example of Victorian imagination, picked up this one as…

What is digital ephemera and how do we save it? Digital ephemera is just that: ephemera that is created in a digital space, such as email, tweets, text messages, and so on. Adam Doster wrote a thought-provoking piece on the subject in American Libraries Magazine entitled, “Saving Digital Ephe…