KOCHI: Maurice Rickards defined ephemera as ‘the minor transient documents of everyday life’. Ephemera refers to something that is meant to be thrown away after being used or enjoyed for only a short time, for example, tickets or postcards.
Not all ephemera are on paper. They could be matter printed on metal, wood, cloth, celluloid or plastic. They could be handwritten documents, phrases woven into ribbons or bookmarks, or painted animation cells.
Postcards and old trade cards are hugely popular categories among collectors of ephemera. Old business cards, especially those for businesses which no longer exist, are another favourite. Collecting old passports is an unusual hobby; it is both interesting and educational as you get to learn about the geography, history and politics of a bygone era.
Almost everyone has an old newspaper cover or two stowed away. Though they are worthless in the collectors’ market they are still fun to collect. Some examples: Man Walks on Moon; WAR; Gandhi Assassinated; Nixon Resigns; Kennedy Shot; World Trade Center Collapses. Being an ardent fan of Mahatma Gandhi, my personal highpoint in ephemera collecting has been getting 10 editions of his weekly journal Harijan, which he started publishing from 11 January 1933.
Most book collectors like to pick up ephemera in their quest for books because it is an interesting sub category. More recently I have taken an interest in literary ephemera such as broadsides, chapbooks, bookplates, booklets and leaflets.
Bookplates or book labels (also known as ex libris meaning ‘from the library of’) are little rectangular labels stuck inside a book carrying the signature of the author in a limited-edition book. For instance, I bought a Harry Potter first edition from a bookshop in the UK where JK Rowling’s signature was on a bookplate affixed to the page before the title page.
But the earliest usage of bookplates was quite the opposite: to denote ownership of a book! An individual booklover or a library would have a bookplate bearing their name stuck to the book. Some wealthy collectors had their own bookplates made. The Art of The Bookplate by James P Keenan is one of my favourite books on this subject.
Broadsides are usually printed on one side only, in different colours, and are illustrated. Collectors keep the best ones framed. One that I’ve framed has a quotation by Nicholas Basbanes and is even numbered and signed.
Chapbooks are like booklets but smaller, and therefore handy. I own a few valuable chapbooks printed by more recent presses as a way to demonstrate how attractive a smaller format can be. Another kind of ephemera that I acquired recently is ‘Grolier Club Notices’, a portfolio of printed announcements, notices and invitations from the Grolier Club, a preeminent bibliophile society in New York founded in 1884. It was issued in 1924 in a marbled cloth folder and holds some of the club’s scarcest ephemera from that period.
Collecting Printed Ephemera by Maurice Rickards is a good reference book for starters. Paper Jewels: Postcards from the Raj by Omar Khan is the first book on postcards printed in the colonial era in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Burma.
Going after ephemera can be frustrating because they are not easy to find, but fun because you never know what you might find! You might buy a box of books and tucked away inside you might find a treasure. But you know what they say: Finders keepers!
