Ephemera articles and stories that will
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“Secure the shadow, ere the substance fades” was one of the earliest advertising slogans used by photographers, as carte de visite (CDV) photographs became all the rage. The phrase urged one and all to capture the image (Secure the shadow) before beloved family members were dead and gone (the su…

Every once in awhile I come across a particular kind of WWII message-to-the-folks-back-home postcard, a novelty cartoon card with a photograph of the soldier or sailor sandwiched inside, his face appearing in a window. This one (below), mailed to Syracuse by Private Michael Herezak, stationed…

For some reason lost in the fog of time, baking powder had usually been packaged in cylindrical cans with bright graphics in eye-catching red, yellow and black. Baking powder is, of course, a leavening agent used in the making of bread and other foods. It is a chemical leavening agent, which gen…

During the Cold War days of the 1950s and 1960s, it began to seem inevitable to one and all that atomic bombs might well soon rain down. At first, mass hysteria ensued, slowly replaced by resigned shrugs as public attention wandered elsewhere. At the height of the phenomenon, bomb shelters g…

Yeah, right. These days I hate to fly, avoid it whenever I can. Long gone are those halcyon days when taking a commercial flight was a joy when everyone put on their Sunday-go-to-meeting duds to fly when travelers were pampered. Nowadays airline advertising is filled with heart-warming, …

In the 19th century, Baltimore was a thriving city. Many of the town’s influential burghers formed a highly secretive society, The Order of the Oriole, which organized what was intended to be a hugely extravagant pageant parade in 1881. It did take place, but was in many ways a disappointment; u…

The Wende Museum in Culver City, California has a fascinating collection of Cold War Era ephemera, including political documents, menus, and posters. The museum houses over 2,000 Soviet and Easter Germany posters, and many are from crucial first free elections in the German Democratic Republ…

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: emu…

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 o…