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Encyclopedia of Ephemera
From: The British Library
| By:
Michael Twyman |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
A great deal of history is not to be found in books or in our most prestigious institutions, because it is told through items that are considered disposable. But even the bus tickets, calling cards and public notices of bygone eras can teach us a great deal about society, according to Michael Twyman, co-editor of a new Encyclopaedia of Ephemera. In the following interview Twyman introduces us to these forgotten documents and what they reveal about our lives. |
Fathom: What are ephemera? |
Michael Twyman: Well, the most lasting definition of ephemera is one that Maurice Rickards applied to the subject area, and that is "the minor transient documents of everyday life." But even he would have accepted that that isn't ideal. Some of the documents that we would classify as ephemera are certainly not transient, and some are not minor, but at least that definition gives an idea of what is meant. From a curatorial point of view, they're the things that don't fit into libraries or print collections or map collections very easily. |
Fathom: Why is it important to study ephemera? |
Twyman: That is, of course, a very difficult question to answer, simply because the range of ephemera is so wide. But certain categories of ephemera tell you about everyday life, like birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates. Certain other kinds of ephemera tell one about practices in everyday life, for example, pieces of labelling that are attached to products sold in supermarkets that ensure that the pot or whatever it is has not been opened. They would tell us that this became an important issue in perhaps the 1990s, a security issue, against tampering with food products in supermarkets. I have begun to set aside some of those items, because they reveal something about the nature of a particular problem at the end of the 20th century, and as far as I know such items didn't exist before then. |
Here is another example. Let's take an expression like "the riot act." The Riot Act was a very specific act, and there are documents that relate to it. The Riot Act had particular forms of wording, and that wording had to be read out to crowds who were misbehaving in one way or another. In my Encyclopaedia of Ephemera, there is a notice in large letters which says, "THE RIOT HAS BEEN READ." So there would be many documents of that kind that tell us something about practises in the past that we don't fully understand today, and they bring to life certain sorts of things that perhaps generalised historical accounts don't particularise. |
Fathom: Does the adjective "ephemeral" refer to the material life of paper as a substance? |
Twyman: I think some people would accept three-dimensional objects as being ephemera, like a tennis ball. We don't. Our concern is with documents. Now, on the whole, where manuscript documents exist as a body which tell you about something, an institution or a company, they would go into archives. You could argue that ephemera are those elements of archives that have escaped from their context. In the long run, one of the important aspects of the study of ephemera is to find the relationship between the individual item that's escaped and the context from which it has escaped. So "ephemeral" does not really relate to the issue of preservation. It relates, or should relate, to the usage. A bus ticket would be an obvious example. |
Fathom: Does part of the interest for you lie in the way in which these items have escaped disposal? |
Twyman: That is a fascinating aspect of the study of ephemera. We know that items of ephemera survive in books. Not just bookmarks, of course, but substitute bookmarks and some sorts of semiconfidential things that might have been put away in books for safety's sake. And some items survive in drawers or cupboards and so forth, but beyond that we don't really know all that much about how the individual items have survived. |
Fathom: Can you talk about the issues involved in collecting and classifying ephemera? |
Twyman: Most books that have been written about ephemera have been written from the collector's point of view. But the purpose of this encyclopaedia is to take a rather broader view of the whole field, and perhaps see commonalities, see what areas need further study, and to outline areas of ignorance. So we've drawn a great deal on the work of collectors, but this encyclopaedia is not essentially about collecting; it's about the serious study of the subject. We are trying to explore some of the issues like collecting policies, particularly for institutions. We take the view that there are two aspects of ephemera that need to be considered when cataloguing. One is the artefactual side of things, what the thing is physically, how it's printed, and what one might call it--for example, a leaflet or a ticket or whatever. The second is the content of these things, and, of course, the two don't always accord with one another very coherently. Cataloguing has to address both of those issues to be useful to the different kinds of people who are going to use collections. One of our hopes would be that we could move towards general agreement about how one would set about cataloguing ephemera. |
Fathom: Do you include pamphlets, newspapers, journals? |
Twyman: We tend to take a very pragmatic view about these things. Newspapers and periodicals are already collected, and people have good collections of them, know how to catalogue them and all the rest of it, so though they are decidedly ephemeral; we would exclude them for pragmatic reasons. Stamps are clearly ephemeral, but it's such a well-considered area of collecting and cataloguing that there isn't any point in going into that area. So I suppose the areas of ephemera we tend to concentrate on are those that are not covered by the traditional collections and institutions of the world. |
Fathom: Could you introduce me to some of the categories that ephemera might fall into? |
Twyman: I'll start with the most obvious. I suppose the starting point for people who became interested in ephemera are the collector's items. Most obviously, things like postcards and cigarette cards. There are perhaps less obvious ones like beer mats and beer labels. Bookmarks, share certificates and so forth, these are all highly collectible items, and vast collections of them exist in private hands and also in some institutions. |
After the collector's items, there are the family-history documents which are well enough known by archivists, most obviously birth, marriage and death certificates, but also personal inventories, or instructions to servants, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Then there are documents that have to do with the organisation of society, like passports or stage-play licences, driving licences, or less commonly known things like an AQ letter sheet, which had to do with water taxes in Venice in the late Renaissance. Those things tell us quite a lot about how society has been organised in the past. |
Then there are categories that relate to advertising. That's most obviously posters and leaflets and show cards and so forth, but also rather more specific categories like broom labels and change packets. Then there are items which are of graphic interest, partly because of the way in which they're designed, or perhaps the way in which they're printed, things like silhouettes, for example, which were very fashionable in the 18th and 19th centuries. There are items that are designed to be seen in two different ways. If you hold them up to the light, then you see a different image, and those are categorised in the encyclopaedia as "hold to light" items of ephemera. Then there are things that have to do with new developments in printing technology, like the security printing process of the early 19th century called "compound plate printing," or the process of transfer photography, which allowed people to write their own documents out by hand and have them printed on. This was almost a precursor of desktop publishing. Such items range from the humble, like weight cards and bus tickets, through to rather more prestigious things like banquet menus or prestigious certificates. |
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| A funeral announcement. | |
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From the <i>Encyclopedia of Ephemera</i>: Playing card, secondary uses
A little-observed aspect of the playing card is its use in connections other than card playing or divination. As mass-produced items printed to a more or less uniform size and on durable stock, and having--at least until the early 1860s--a conveniently blank side on which to print or write, the playing card did duty in a wide range of improvisations. |
Though at first sight an extravagance, the secondary use was in fact confined to damaged or incomplete packs. Loss or impairment of a single card invalidated the whole of the remainder of the pack and the secondary use of such cards was thus not only a matter of convenience but of economy. Secondary use took two forms: physical alteration and written or printed addition. Typical of the first category were uses as bookmarks (where the card was cut with a v-shaped slit to allow for insertion over the head of the selected page), and cutting into halves or quarters as fractional units in money substitutes. Separate halves were also used in early maternity wards for mother/baby identification, one half being taped to each. A similar tag-label use was also common among lawyers and accountants for the identification of bundles of papers. |
A further form of physical alteration was the cropping of corners, in the case of halves or quartered pieces, to balance existing rounded corners, and as an indication of cancellation. A rarer physical alteration is represented by an 18th-century coin collection cataloguing system, in which the impressed image of each individual coin appears obverse and reverse, duly annotated in handwriting on the front and rear faces of a single folded playing card. |
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| A playing card. | |
Printed or handwritten additions, by far the commonest form of alteration, appear either on the complete card or as an integral unit on cut cards. Handwritten addenda present a wide variety of secondary use: personal notes, memoranda and messages, poetry and musical scores, IOUs, cheques and lottery tickets, shopping lists, charity tokens, visiting cards, invoices and receipts, rent demands. All these and more have appeared on the backs (and occasionally fronts) of playing cards. |
Edward Gibbon, author of History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, used playing cards not only to acknowledge gambling debts but in an extensive series of bibliographical catalogue cards recording items in his library. The series, under the title "Library stock and reference cards," is now housed in the British Museum and comprises over 1,000 different playing cards. Other notabilities recorded as having used playing cards for secondary purposes include Louis XVI, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Louis Pasteur, Benjamin Franklin, and Queen Elizabeth I. |
Printed additions to playing cards were at some periods as common as those in handwriting. A major field was improvised currency. In the 17th and 18th centuries in Canada, playing cards introduced by the French authorities were used as money for the payment of troops. Issued in denominations of four francs, forty and fifteen sols, and cut in quarters, their introduction was covered by an ordinance proclaiming their legality and guaranteeing their redeemability. The cards became so widely accepted that at some stages completely blank playing cards, imported unprinted from France, were used instead of finished cards. There was a period from 1865 to 1759 during which there were two kinds of improvised currency in Canada--"card money" and "playing card money"--both equally valid. |
Other uses of playing-card currency are found in France, Austria, Germany, and Surinam. In the French Revolution, when denominations of the new government's "assignats" proved too high for everyday needs, "billets de confiance" appeared. These small denomination "notes," introduced by self-appointed organizations and individuals and relying on the probity of their issuers, were printed on the backs of playing cards. A handwritten "endorsement" on the back of the card was countersigned, and a signature and number entered on the printed reverse. "Playing-card money" was used not only as general currency but in some cases as commodity tokens. Bread, meat, and candles were obtainable from suppliers in specific districts against printed "bons": "bon pour quatre livres de pain, a delivrer par les boulangers de la section, est payables, les 1er et 16 de chaque mois par le sous-signé." |
As a sidelight on the use of playing cards as improvised money, a widespread tendency was for the 'court cards' to appear as higher denominations, their relative importance when playing cards being equated with greater financial values. |
Printed alterations made to playing cards extend also to noncurrency uses; these include wedding and funeral invitations, marriage certificates, ration coupons, summonses, and admission tickets. Less widespread, but no less fully authenticated, was the use of playing-card backs as a base for printed or stencilled language teaching aids, so that cards bearing separate syllables could be arranged to complete words and phrases. |
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| Nuisance paper. | |
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Nuisance papers
A common nuisance was defined in Burn's Justice of the Pence and Parish Officer (21st edn, Cadell & Davies, 1810) as "an offence against the public, either by doing a thing which tends to the annoyance of all of the King's subjects, or by neglecting to do a thing which the common good requires." Annoyances to the prejudice of individuals are not punishable by public prosecution but through private actions of the persons aggrieved. |
Nuisances may take a wide variety of forms. Classically they have included: "bawdy houses, gaming houses and stages for rope dancers"; playhouses if they attract "such a number of coaches or people as prove generally inconvenient to the places adjacent"; "obstruction of neighbour's daylight"; "making offensive smells or noises"; "making great noises in the night"; and "erecting a dovecote without licence from the lord of the manor." |
The "common scold" was also liable to prosecution as a common nuisance. One such was convicted in the 18th century "for being a common or turbulent brawler and sower of discord amongst her quiet and honest neighbours, so that she hath stirred, moved and incited divers strifes, controversies, quarrels and disputes amongst His Majesty's liege people, against the peace." |
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| Nuisance paper. | |
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Papers relating to the common scold are rare, but it is clear that the notion of action against her survived into the first decades of the 19th century. One handwritten fragment date-lined Blackburn, 12 October 1840, sets out a complaint which is clearly a prelude to prosecution: "Gents: This is to certify that we the undersigned being neighbours to the said Mrs Sarah Bagley of Fish St, we can prove our own personal observations that she is a very uneasy neighbour and is never free from broils and disturbances arrising from the natural disposition to quarrel as well as from the impetuosity of her tempers as witness our hands: James Lonsdale; Richard Bell; John Whiteside." This document is cropped immediately below the last signature, and it is evident from fold-creases that the sheet was originally foolscap in size; it may therefore have had further signatures. |
Another form of nuisance appears in a manuscript item from New Hampshire dated 1891. This is a receipt written by S. W. Hulman "For the town of Hillborough." It reads: "Reed of C Nilson Esq ten dollars to settle claim of town of Hillborough, through Board of Health ... for leaving dead hog in the Contoocook River." |
Frost fair papers
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| Frost fair paper. | |
Prior to its removal, the narrow arches and broad footings of the old London Bridge caused serious obstruction to the flow of the Thames, and in freezing weather ice formed readily on the slow-moving water. Records of its surface freezing solid date from the 13th century, and first references to fairs and other diversions on the ice appeared in 1564, when some Londoners were recorded as playing football in mid-river, and others shooting at marks. |
The frost fair became an accepted London institution, and by the late 17th and 18th centuries the event (depending on the length and strength of the freeze-up) reached major proportions. In the frost of 1683-84 there was a street of booths, puppet shows, bull-baiting, horse racing, and ox-roasting, and John Evelyn records that "ladyes took a fancy to have their names printed, and the day and the yeare set down when printed on the Thames." |
The printing press rapidly became a standard feature of frost fairs, and numb-fingered printers set up customers' names in pre-set decorative borders and printed them "on the ice" at a few pence a time. In the frost of 1814, as well as donkey rides, swings, bookstalls, skittle alleys, merry-go-rounds, and other attractions, there were eight or ten printing presses offering cards, leaflets, and own-name mementos. |
Items printed on ice included crude wood-cut illustrations, doggerel ballads, and small pieces of paper bearing no more than the words "printed on the ice" or "printed on the Thames" and quoting the date. The appeal of the frost fairs extended to the famous. On Friday 16 February 1740, William Hogarth took his pug Trump for a run on the ice at Whitehall, recording the occasion with a souvenir bearing not his own name but that of his dog. In the 1684 freeze, King Charles II and five members of the royal family visited the fair and had their names grouped collectively on a single sheet. An extra member of the party, not yet quite present, but shortly expected, was the Princess Anne's forthcoming infant, described on the list as Hans in Kelder --"Jack in the cellar." |
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| Dental paper. | |
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Dental papers
The emergence of dentistry as a scientific discipline is relatively recent, and dental publicity ephemera, with their many protestations of painlessness and efficiency, reflect the fact unerringly. They are perhaps most revealing when at their most zealous:
Every instrument used by Mr Wigley is thoroughly aseptic by sterilization, and the same observance of perfect cleanliness should be continued by the patient. Caution: Never, under any circumstances, allow strangers or ignorant commission agents travelling from door to door to interfere with your teeth. Apart from the dreadful ignorance of men, who under all kinds of pretences foist cheap factory made teeth upon the public, there is the very great danger of allowing unknown strangers to attempt work they probably know nothing about with disease-laden appliances carried in a hand-bag. The perfect sterilizing and extreme care necessary is not possible to men travelling from house to house. Such important work should be done in a place completely equipped for the purpose. |
This final paragraph from a folder of "instructions to the patient," Walsall (c. 1916), conveys the professional still struggling with 19th-century attitudes, still living down the image of the itinerant or part-time tooth-puller. |
The itinerant dentist, himself only a generation or two remote from his fairground forebear, was a recognized figure of the early part of the 19th century. In remote areas in America he travelled (as did his colleagues the writing masters, and later the photographers) with a trade card or handbill in which space for the name of the town was left blank for filling in on arrival. |
The profession of dentistry, emerging over the course of the 19th century, contended not only with a legacy of ignorance (on the part of practitioner and patient alike) but on the all-too-obvious inadequacies of current techniques. Developments in anaesthesia were slow. Prosthesis for long remained experimental. Work on the control of caries, general preventive dentistry, and orthodontics (correction of growth abnormality) did not begin seriously until the first quarter of the 20th century. |
The rise of dentistry as a profession was reflected in a prolific output of publicity material, much of it couched in terms of the shopkeeper, and most of it highly competitive. It is in this promotion material (publicity forbidden in Britain by law in 1921) that the story is most graphically--if obliquely--conveyed, as in these examples: |
(Trade card: New England, c. 1840) A. O. Dickey, Operative Dentist, Respectfully tenders his services to the Ladies and Gentlemen of (--) Decayed teeth filled, and Mineral teeth inserted on Gold-Plate, or Pivot, Kine and Sea-Horse teeth upon Ivory Plate, Clasp or Pivot from one to a whole set, and every other operation necessary to preserve and beautify the teeth, executed in the neatest and most durable manner and warranted. |
(Leaflet: Maryland, c. 1880) Dr Eavey's Painless Dental Parlors ... teeth extracted positively without pain by the use of Vitalized Air or a local application on the gums.... My Vitalized Air is the original air as used all over the world ... all work done by experienced dentists and graduates. We are no floating dentists. We are here to stay.... |
(Folder: Darlington, 1834) H. Barlow, Jun: Medical and Perfumery Warehouse. Chemist etc. ... an extensive assortment of genuine patent and cattle medicines ... bleeding and tooth drawing.... |
(Folding card: Torquay, c. 1890) J. M. Rendall M.P.S. Practical dentistry ... Patients waited upon at their homes, in town or country ... Schools attended ... Attendance on the Poor for Extraction 9 to loam, free of charge.... A reduction to servants.... |
(Press announcement: Oxford Street, London, c. 1840) Tooth-ache cured by fumigation ... Mr Lock continues to cure the tooth-ache, by fumigation, or Steam from Foreign Herbs, which has the effect of destroying the Nerve without causing any Pain to the Patient. The cure is effected in three seconds. The tooth remains firm in the socket, and will not decay any further.... Charges moderate according to the circumstances of the patient.... |
(Trade card: New York, c. 1890) My sets of teeth cannot be beat for $4, $8 and $10.... My teeth have the approval of all who wear them, as being firm and easy in the mouth, giving the sunken cheeks a round, full and youthful appearance.... Teeth extracted without charge if artificial teeth are to be inserted.... Remember the number, 157 East 38th Street.... |
(Magazine insert: Newcastle-on-Tyne, c. 1895) They resemble nature so closely as to render detection impossible!!! Mr George Richardson, surgeon dentist ... inserts artificial teeth (by his New Painless Process) which, for comfort, durability and natural appearance, are unequalled ... consultations free ... country patients allowed rail fare, and fitted with sets or parts in time to return same day. |
In addition to promotional material, the ephemera of the history of dentistry reveal increasing quantities of papers of organization and method. Folders and cards giving advice on post-extraction mouth hygiene, dental record charts, and "visit-reminder cards" are increasingly in evidence, and in the 1920s and 1930s general dental hygiene education emerges as a major topic. Preventive dentistry may be said to date from the mid 19th century, but it was not until the beginning of the 20th century that public authorities in Britain (and private agencies in America) began to take the matter seriously. The benefits of organized dental care among troops in the Boer War, and of compulsory dental inspection and treatment for soldiers in most of the armies of World War I, led to the inception of clinics, dental infirmaries, and other treatment centres. These put out instructional charts and other printed matter, as did the expanding toothpaste industry. |
In Britain the Dental Propaganda Committee, set up in 1923, produced posters and leaflets for use in schools, and general health education and industrial safety agencies also put out oral hygiene material. |
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