History’s Other HalfbyLaine Farley
“If you take mankind’s five centuries or so of printed record and divide it roughly down the middle, you find half of it on library shelves and the other half in the waste-basket.” So begins a 1980 article by Maurice Rickards, founder of the Ephemera Society and editor of the Encyclopedia of Ephemera. These “transient minor documents of everyday life,” often dismissed and discarded, are of utmost interest to the collector of ephemera precisely because they are so taken for granted. He goes on to say: We are familiar, from the library shelf, with the facts about nineteenth-century poverty; the record is fulsome. But how infinitely more telling, more potently compressed, is the workhouse admission form, the soup ticket, the debtors’ prison diet chart—the actual document of the instant itself.Rickard’s words eerily echoed my own experience recently. As I waited for a guided tour of the famous Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin, I pored over just such a prison diet chart in the museum; it precisely listed each prisoner’s meager ration in an elegant hand. It seemed ironic that more attention was paid to making the record than to providing a decent meal for the prisoners. Later I learned that during the Potato Famine, citizens tried to enter the Gaol because there was at least the promise of a meal, whereas on the outside, they were very likely to go wanting. This “actual document of the instant itself” proved valuable as it invoked the reality of a prison employee carefully cataloging the thin line between life and death for thousands of people. Not all ephemera are so dramatic, but each piece carries “a living moment of someone else’s time.” Many collectors, of bookmarks as well as other more popular types of ephemera specialize in a particular producer or form such as Stevengraphs or silver. Advanced collectors may winnow their stash, keeping only the most pristine or rare. Perhaps I will eventually do the same, forced by lack of space or a change in interests. For now the homeliest bookmark is just as interesting as the most elegant, precisely because each one represents a particular manifestation of its time and place, its creator’s purpose and capacity. Rickards goes on to acknowledge that ephemera have presented challenges for those who strive to keep it, its unordered boxes creating a “nest of indiscipline” and being “susceptible of no clear-cut system of control” compared with the “relative order of the bookshelf.” He must have had a tussle with a librarian along the way as he notes that “By many it is viewed with irritation amounting sometimes to anger.” It is true that libraries sometimes have trouble providing a home for ephemera. This week, I received an inquiry from an archivist who was volunteering at a local historical society. She was seeking a home for a collection of bookmarks ranging from the rare to the ordinary that had been lovingly compiled by a former employee at a local library. Unfortunately, the collector’s employer didn’t want to keep it nor did the prestigious academic special collections library where the volunteer worked. Two local historical societies felt there was no real local interest angle to justify adding it to their collections. Although the volunteer must see many rare and obviously valuable collections of documents in her regular job, she was intrigued by these “smalls” as they are sometimes called in the trade. She wondered if there were any libraries that already had bookmark collections to which this one could be added. Every so often I try to locate such collections but have found very little. Occasionally bookmarks are listed in archival collections of library publications and ephemera or with the records of publishers as part of their promotional materials. A few bookmarks might appear in the personal papers of anyone whose collection included books or memorabilia. Even fewer examples have been digitized but there are examples at Duke University’s Emergence of Advertising in America, 1850-1920 and the Smithsonian’s Warshaw Collection of Business Americana, 1838-1953. The Bella Landauer collection of ephemera at the New York Historical Society is one of the largest and oldest in the U.S. She was the only child of a profitable corset manufacturer (see Lauren’s recent column for a corset compendium) and wife of a businessman who began collecting bookplates. Her collection eventually expanded to include many forms of ephemera including bookmarks. The collection is large and described in general terms, listing bookmarks as a category but with no other information on numbers or types. Another significant collection is the Menden Trade Card Collection, ca. 1850-ca. 1910 at Smith College. This collection of almost 3,000 cards focuses on advertising cards but also includes an album of nineteenth-century bookmarks and printed ribbons of a political, business and sentimental nature. Some trade cards are close in size to bookmarks and many in this collection were produced by lithographers such as Prang and Tuck who also designed bookmarks. The Winterthur Museum in Delaware has considerable ephemera collections with at least one that consists primarily of bookmarks. The source is uncertain so it is generically named Bookmark Collection, ca. 1890-ca.1930, but it appears to be associated with several members of the Larkin family in Chester County, PA. The thirty-eight bookmarks are mostly homemade in various fabrics along with some advertising markers of the period. Other collections devoted solely to bookmarks include two at the Denver Public Library: the Harry J. Mooney bookmark collection, 1910-1989, a box of bookmarks from stores, companies, and individuals chiefly from Colorado, and the Ida Zager Bookmark Collection, 1944-1992, which includes six boxes of markers from around the world. These bookmarks are safely stored in acid free containers and protected inside the special collections departments of libraries—surely Mr. Rickards would have been pleased. Yet, they are less accessible for having been saved in the most protected part of the library. It is unlikely they would be able to travel to a requestor and only slightly possible that a few samples might be photocopied for an interested researcher. Typically, an onsite visit is necessary to examine such materials. I was able to see a small collection at the University of California, Santa Barbara which has the extensive Romaine Trade Catalog Collection. Lawrence B. Romaine was an antiquarian book dealer who developed a collection of over 41,000 trade catalogs from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Now, that’s a specialized ephemera collection. Among the catalogs is a set of booksellers’ trade catalogs, 1875-1930 and other ephemera including ten bookmarks. From this small sample, I learned that a book on life New Bedford, MA one hundred years ago has at least four editions and it has a whaling museum, and that the edition of The Taverns and Turnpikes of Blandford, 1733-1833 published in 1908 “approaches exhaustion and will not be reprinted” as of 1929. A bookstore called Bookville existed in Newark, NJ before area codes were implemented, and Browne’s Bookstore in Chicago must have been a very nice environment based on the detailed drawing and description of its location on the seventh floor of the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Boulevard. Moreover, I could have bought a book on the beaver for a dollar and a volume on A Romance of Dijon for two francs in the late 1890s. The list of new books in Spring, 1907 from an unknown publisher (poor marketing!) included The Thinking Machine and Is He Popenjoy? by Trollope but I can deduce this list is from Dodd, Mead thanks to library catalogs. One of the most interesting is a detailed illustration of the “Skyline of Lower New York City, from the Hudson River” by Edwin J. Meeker, a New Jersey illustrator whose work appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s Weekly and other magazines around the turn of the twentieth century. On the reverse is promotion for The Rosary by Florence L. Barclay that touts it as “An ideal love story-one that justifies the publishing business, refreshes the heart of the reviewer, strengthens faith in the outcome of the great experiment of putting humanity on earth” and it had already sold over a quarter of a million copies. Not bad for the early 1900s but who knows of her today? All of these little “transient oddments,” as Rickards would say, are not the most dramatic or valuable emblems of their time, but they do offer small moments of everyday life and can lead us to learn about many things that start small and grow into significance over time. A 1998 article titled “Ephemera Collecting - A Growing Field, Hard to Define” by John C. Dann of the Ephemera Society of America serves as a nice bookend to the article by Rickards which celebrated World Ephemera Day in 1980, the same year the American society was established. Dann reflects on the maturity of the field that has always fallen between the cracks of traditional collecting fields and librarianship, “not books, not ‘art’ in the formal sense, not manuscripts, not antiques.” He describes the evolutionary process of collecting that begins first with an awakening of appreciation by pioneers. The accumulative phase focuses on acquiring as many examples as possible in order to analyze patterns. The third bibliographical phase involves creation of documentation such as lists, price guides, catalogs which can then inspire new interest. The fourth phase reaches for academic credibility “through serious, comprehensive descriptive publications, of previously ignored material objects as legitimate documents and records of social history and artistic endeavor.” Bookmarks as a sub-specialty are probably somewhere between the second and third phases based on the number and type of formal publications and availability of collections. He rightly notes that “ephemera remains a delightful “free form" of collecting, where the variety of material offered for sale is almost boundless and prices of much of it within the reach of the most impecunious novice collector,” making it a truly democratic hobby.  A personal collection that I hope to examine summarizes both the accessibility of ephemera for the average collector and the view into “history’s other half” they can provide. The Papers, ca. 1869-1948 of Olive Percival at UCLA consists of ten thousand books, including many children’s books, as well as other collections consisting of correspondence, photographs, negatives, scrapbooks, guest books, typescripts of articles and poems, bookmarks, and bookplates. As the collection guide explains: The collection represents the personal hobby of Miss Olive Percival, first woman real estate agent of Los Angeles, and reflects her personality as revealing as a private diary. The intense love which she bestowed on these nostalgic mementos of her own childhood days, is evident from the notations penciled in many of the books, and in the artistic protective covers and book marks which she made for them.This very personal collection provides insights not only into the collector and her interests but also the times in which she lived. Her care in preserving memories and memorabilia is a gift to the future. Bookmark specifications: Lot of 26 bookmarks Dimensions: Various Material: Paper Manufacturer: Various Date: 1920s to 1980s Acquired: eBay Bookmark specifications: Remember Me Dimensions: 2 5/8 x 8 1 / 2 Material: Embroidered punch paper Manufacturer: Unknown Date: 190? Acquired: eBay Laine Farley is a digital librarian who misses being around the look, feel and smell of real books. Her collection of over 3,000 bookmarks began with a serendipitous find while reviewing books donated to the library. Fortunately, her complementary collection of articles and books about bookmarks provides an excuse for her to get back to libraries and try her hand at writing about bookmarks. Collecting Bookmarks (Physical, not Virtual) is Farley's website. Contact Laine.
|