Ephemera articles and stories that will
educate, inspire, and delight!

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…

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…

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 …

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 car…

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 tha…

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 …

We were discouraged by neither the tropical storm warnings nor the twisting back roads of rural Pennsylvania – the two intense days of tours were superb! We had chosen to meet around the Allentown Paper Show (that sprawling cornucopia of the full range of paper collecting, on the same campus as …

Back when America was largely an agricultural nation, folks were accustomed to personally processing their crops and their animals into food for the table. As the 19th century moved along and industrialization increasingly created manufactured tools and equipment, farm machinery became a major s…