The Scrapbooks of Harry Houdini

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1966 Batman Valentine's

Happy Valentine's Day.

Vintage Candy Wrappers

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Witchcraft

Some paper ephemera, care of Letterology.

A Gallery of Bread Wrapper Labels

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Soviet Union-Era Space-Themed Stamps

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F. Scott Fitzgerald's Ledger

"This is a record of everything Fitzgerald wrote, and what he did with it, in his own hand."

From a story on Yahoo...

During a recent visit to the library's below-ground rare-book vault, Sudduth took the original 200-page book out of its clamshell protective cover. The ledger's yellowed pages — with Fitzgerald's elegant, measured cursive strokes — are a throwback to life before computer spreadsheets. The ledger shows Fitzgerald's tally of earnings from his works, the most famous of which is the novel "The Great Gatsby." The ledger lists his many short stories, books, and adaptations for stage and screen.

With the May 10 release of a new "Gatsby" movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Sudduth says library officials expect an upswing in interest in its Fitzgerald collection. The ledger will be on display at the library for about a month starting May 6, Sudduth said.

The library's Fitzgerald collection is considered the world's most comprehensive, with more than 3,000 publications, manuscripts, letters, book editions, screenplays and memorabilia. It also includes Fitzgerald's walking stick, briefcase and an engraved silver flask his wife gave him in 1918.

The Lost Poem of James Joyce

A nine-year-old James Joyce wrote a poem. Broadsides were printed. Where are they?

From a story in the Irish Times...

But it was the nine-year-old Joyce who, in 1891, composed the eulogistic verses that his younger brother Stanislaus later referred to as “the Parnell poem”. (Joyce subsequently sanctioned the Latinate title Et Tu, Healy .) Stanislaus, to whose imperfect memory we owe the three lines with which I began, described the poem as “a diatribe against the supposed traitor, Time Healy, who had ratted at the bidding of the Catholic bishops and become a virulent enemy of Parnell, and so the piece was an echo of those political rancours that formed the theme of my father’s nightly, half-drunken rantings”.

Stanislaus reports that John Joyce, delighted by his son’s production, “had it printed, and distributed the broadsheets to admirers. I have a distinct recollection of my father’s bringing home a roll of 30 or 40 of them.” He also remembered that, in the (largely destroyed) thousand-page first draft of A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man , later published under the title Stephen Hero , “my brother referred to the remaining broadsheets, of which the young Stephen Dedalus had been so proud, lying on the floor torn and muddied by the boots of the furniture removers” when the family moved from Blackrock in 1892.

The Beauty of Letterpress

The Beauty of Letterpress - The Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum from Beauty of Letterpress on Vimeo.

Vintage Japanese Shipping Line Journals

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Finnish Passports are Fun

Estonian Candy Wrappers

Sweet!

Inside the Black Books of Cultural Icons

The books, care of Flavorwire.

Penmanship Manuals of Late 19th Century Italy

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Holy Grail - the T206 Honus Wagner Baseball Card

This is One of the Oldest Baseball Cards That Exist

It should do well at auction.

From a story in the Times Colonist...

It's not the same as a modern baseball card, which became commonplace beginning in the 1880s. Instead, it's an original photograph from 1865 of the Brooklyn Atlantics amateur baseball club mounted on a card. The card shows nine players gathered around their manager.

Thibodeau said he's aware of only two such cards in existence, the other at the Library of Congress. Putting a dollar-figure value on it is difficult, he said, but he expects it to fetch at least $100,000 at the Feb. 6 auction.

"There hasn't been another one that's sold," he said. "When there are only two known in the world, what's it worth?"

Last summer, the auction house sold a rare 1888 card of Hall of Fame baseball player Michael "King" Kelly for $72,000. The priciest baseball card ever is a 1909 Honus Wagner card, which sold for $2.8 million in 2007.

The Library of Congress has had another copy of the Brooklyn Atlantics photograph since the late 1800s, when it took possession of it from a New York court where the photographer, Charles Williamson, had submitted it for copyright.

A Treasure Chest of Vintage Toy Catalogs

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Have a Cool Million?

Then you can bid on an extremely rare "Metropolis" movie poster.

From a story on Reuters...


The poster, one of four known surviving copies, was illustrated by German Heinz Schulz-Neudamm. One copy is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The "Metropolis" poster is the crown jewel of the collection and was purchased by California collector Kenneth Schachter for a record $690,000 in 2005 private sale.

"We do expect people to overbid," Marcus A. Tompkins, a lawyer for the bankruptcy trustee, told Reuters. "We've been getting a lot of inquiries."

Schachter, a resident of Valencia about 30 miles northwest of Los Angeles, filed for bankruptcy last year after he was unable to repay loans he received to buy film memorabilia.

The Labatt Employee Drinking Songs Booklet

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20 Swedish Posters for 1930s Hollywood

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