Collecting Ephemera

The great Nicholas Basbanes discusses the collecting of paper ephemera in Fine Books & Collections Magazine.

From the piece...

Ephemera, as we all know, is a genre of collecting that embraces a multitude of printed objects never intended by their makers to last the long haul, but deciding what is worth paying good money to acquire, and what indeed is collectible in the first instance, is not so clear cut.

When I asked the master ephemera collector John Grossman of Tucson, Arizona, during a recent interview for a working guideline, and later posed the same question to E. Richard McKinstry of the Winterthur Library in Delaware, where Grossman’s vast accumulation of a quarter-million pieces are now on extended loan, both laughed, prompting me to suggest half-seriously what the Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart offered in 1964 when pressed to define hard-core pornography. “I know it,” the judge said, “when I see it.”

For Grossman, a retired commercial artist and graphic designer formerly based in San Francisco, the rule of thumb over three decades of determined collecting was to pursue material that represented the development of chromolithography, a multi-color method of printing that began to emerge in the early decades of the nineteenth century as a fresh new way to promote goods and services, but branched out into a variety of areas with mass-market appeal.

“One way to start a collection like this is to begin with a time period,” Grossman said, and while he gives the years 1820 to 1920 for his parameters, he readily admits to having bent the boundaries occasionally in either direction. But as to documenting ephemera, there really is no way, ultimately, to codify it precisely, Grossman agreed.