16 
Printed Ephemera
16 MICHAEL HARRIS
The category of ephemera forms an elusive, sometimes contentious, element in the output of print. The aim of this essay is not to attempt to describe everything that can be identified as ephemera, but rather to trace the category’s porous boundaries and, in particular, to suggest how different forms have, over time, changed in their relationship to the book. Ephemera challenges definition, and studies have tended to locate the material at the fringes of everyday life. The general sense of marginality is reinforced by the flux of advertisements and notices, concerned for example with pizza delivery and weight-loss clinics, which clog up the postal services. Indeed, whatever the extent of the electronic revolution (see 21), it has not undermined, and in many respects has multiplied, the variety of fugitive or ephemeral print.
Implicit in the definition of printed ephemera as marginal is the notion of a great sea of flimsy print continuously washing up against the sturdy breakwaters of the book—that the book and the printed non-book are two aspects of the same thing. In this notion, the book, as the codex, identified by its binding, its bulk, and its capacity and manufacture for indefinite preservation, is a distinct entity. It is a pragmatic view that has clear benefits to the individuals and institutions seeking to construct a library and preserve its contents. One of the problems with the dialectic between ephemera and books, however, is that the book, though obviously distinct on the shelf, is itself an inherently insecure component of print culture. The book as a form is usually placed at the top of a hierarchy of print, standing at the pinnacle of a pyramid of output that broadens out to the flat base of printed ephemera. However, this seems less than realistic, given the ephemeral nature of many books; moreover, their own boundaries with other forms are often insecure, blurring and fading over time. Within print culture, there has been a continuous process of reassessment, which (mainly through collection) has brought a range of non-book material into a new conceptual alignment with the book and suggested the limitations of the current use of the term ‘ephemera’.
As currently formulated, ephemera are usually identified in terms of their physical characteristics. Their primary form is as a single piece of paper, although this can be extended to a sheet folded into a limited, but not usually defined, number of pages. However, this is not a hard and fast rule over the historical period of print; telephone directories or railway timetables may also be identified as ephemera in book form on the basis of their content. Typically unbound though often in wrappers, ephemera were usually limited to a day-to-day use and had disposal or destruction as their likely end. This applied particularly to the enormous category of printed advertisements. Even so, the characteristic of disposability has its own problems. Printed ephemera were sometimes produced to be collected and even preserved. This was the case, for example, with cigarette cards as well as with the memorials of such historic events as the battle of Blenheim, the death of Nelson, or the Great Exhibition of 1851. The durability of ephemera through a growing range of individual collections is discussed below.
If the physical characteristics of material lumped under the heading of ephemera are hard to identify, establishing the chronology of ephemeral print’s production is equally problematic. Much writing on the subject has emphasized the material’s production side. In this context, the business of the jobbing printer and developments in printing and paper technology are crucial (see 10, 11). Both these elements offer a way into the history of the subject and a framework for its analysis; however, they also create a tendency to push the development of forms of ephemeral material into the 19th and 20th centuries, which become, by implication, an age of ephemera. Nobody suggests that such material was not produced before 1800; but the almost total loss of many or most of the early forms—whose rarity is marked by the high commercial value of such items as advertisements for night soil removal—has created some distortion. Similarly, a historical focus on the business organization of printers engaged in the mixed production of books, serials, and jobbing printing has done little, if anything, to augment our understanding of the ephemeral materials themselves.
The modern chronology of the output of ephemeral print must be weighed against the huge scale of material produced across the early modern period. One factor that drove the increase in printed ephemera was the erratic but continuous move from MS to print (see 15). From the early 17th century, serial information, including news, moved from handwritten copies to a printed equivalent. For other kinds of pragmatic material, both freely distributed and paid for, it is extremely difficult to follow the process that changed their character. Advertisements in late 17th-century newspapers indicate that several members of the book trade specialized in the production and supply of printed forms geared to tax collection and other kinds of bureaucratic organization. By 1700, print was the natural medium for handbills and posters, at least in London, and the lines of serial print were beginning to extend across the nation. When Ned Ward visited the Royal Exchange in 1699 during the course of his ramble, he found the pillars and every available wall space covered with posters and advertisements, the bulk probably in printed form. There are no pictorial representations of this scene complete with its burden of fly-posting. In fact, the general exclusion of ephemeral print is a feature of illustrations of London’s built environment at this time. Set against this are the views offered in 19th-century prints. In this period, the fascination with the output of the developing technology of print, combined with a growing interest in the lower levels of print culture, supported the production of some striking images depicting the mass of print displayed in public spaces.
The spread of ephemera and display types: playbills, posters, and broadsides painted by John Orlando Parry in his London Street Scene (1835), also known as The Posterman. Courtesy of Alfred Dunhill Museum and Archive
Across the entire modern period, a huge and expanding volume of print in all its forms was in circulation. In the attempt to get some sort of bibliographical control over the composition and character of ephemera, scholars have undertaken a process of listing. This has usually been done by constructing sequences made up of main physical forms and of the themes around which ephemeral print has clustered, for example, business, transport, leisure and entertainment, and home life. The Encyclopedia of Ephemera originally compiled by Maurice Rickards, and edited and completed by Michael Twyman, offers a long alphabetical list made up of categories and describes, among other items, ‘Fly-paper’, ‘Quack advertising’, ‘Telephone card’, and ‘Zoëtrope strip/disc’ (an early method of creating the illusion of movement through revolving pictures). If the Encyclopedia does not define the field, at least it makes a heroic attempt at laying out an impressive range of representative samples and at providing a useful, inevitably selective, series of bibliographies. An underlying problem with this and alternative listings is that they tend to create an artificial homogeneity in which all the selected non-book materials have an equivalent importance. An alternative approach maintains the interest in form, but focuses on the ways in which the separation of blocks of material has come about, in particular through the process of collection.
In its raw state, printed ephemera can be seen as a huge and alarming heap of materials—the trivial and the profound, the commercial and the exhortatory—jumbled together in the context of the confused variety of everyday life. Supply-side analysis emphasizes this diversity and invariably highlights the technology of production and its relation to what could be done in the printing office. Ephemeral print cannot be defined through the character of the organization or business through which it was produced, however. Any analysis of collecting ephemera, on the other hand, begins with the idea of consumption and indicates the ways in which the conditions for the identification and classification of non-book materials were created. Across the entire period in which the proliferation and diversification of print was taking place, collectors began to offer a gloss on the meanings and uses of an apparently inchoate mass of individual items. Through their intervention, large areas of what is still included with printed ephemera have moved out of the shadowy hinterland of the trivial and disposable to another level where a new set of definitions is required. A few examples follow, each of them having a flexible link to the general category of street literature.
The street was and remains one of the most dynamic sites for the dispersal of ephemeral printed products. During the Victorian period, the average metropolitan flâneur could expect to be offered dozens of printed items, advertisements, and handbills during a stroll along Oxford Street in London. In the 17th and 18th centuries, huge quantities of handbills—medical, political (in vast numbers during elections), or commercial—were passed around the streets of London and its suburbs; much of the material was entirely free, and so it remains in the 21st century. The wastage was almost total and the survival of single copies, used as bookmarks or wrapping paper, is almost miraculously unusual. The same can be said of posters, which were once a prominent feature of the urban environment but have since largely disappeared. Even so, some of the materials distributed at street level have survived to become part of the historical printed archive.
All of the street-based material noted above was free and instantly disposable, and hence had an exceedingly short life expectancy. At the same time, within the flow of street-based print was to be found the commercial presence of paid-for material, such as ballads, almanacs, newspapers, and chapbooks; these represented a significant link between the respectable book trade and the popular consumer. Such products satisfy the definitions of ephemerality: their distribution matched the output of handbills in scale and informality, and their survival was just as uncertain. They formed part of the retail process that ran through the street. The presence of this paid-for material and of its hawkers as part of the notorious hyperactivity of the London streets took on a respectable visual dimension through the publication of a series of images representing a cross-section of street traders. From the 1690s, the most frequently reprinted images were those produced by Marcellus Laroon the elder. His lifelike portraits of street dealers, probably from around Covent Garden, published in The Cryes of the City of London Drawne after the Life (1687), included some of those whose uncertain livelihood was drawn from the open-air sale of ephemeral forms of print. They included a pair of ballad sellers, an almanac dealer, a newspaper seller and a pedlar whose tray, filled with ‘knicknackatories’, probably contained a selection of chapbooks. It is this range of generally disposable material that provides the focus of what follows.
Ballads, chapbooks, almanacs, and newspapers were issued under the direction of core members of the book trade working within the orbit of the Stationers’ Company. The trade had a presence in the street through the booths and stalls long established in London, while at least some of the hawkers were full or part-time employees of booksellers. Despite these formal arrangements, the products the hawkers sold were, in form and character, intended for the medium of the street, and as such were cheap, short term, and disposable. Though they were produced in very large quantities, their survival was far from assured. Indeed, at the point of purchase and use, it was hard to distinguish them from the other paper items that ebbed and flowed within most urban centres. The question is: how did some components of this material take on an aggregate status over time that has required a different formulation in relation to the book?
The first collectors of ephemeral print were attracted to the street-based, popular character of the material. Individuals—influenced by a variety of cultural and commercial motives—began the process of gathering and preservation, which gradually gave elements of ephemera a place within contemporary private and public collections. Collectors’ ideas about popular print were inevitably affected by changing social, political, and economic forces. However, the initial impulse to accumulate and safeguard this material formed part of a more general phenomenon of collecting that, during the 17th century, characterized the activities of the endlessly curious and acquisitive sector of middling society known as virtuosos.
The cultural importance of this amorphous group in the construction of what has been described as a bourgeois public sphere was manifested most fully in the social environment of the coffee house. Such public spaces helped develop the shared interests of its patrons, most notably through serial print, which formed an integral part of coffee house culture. That culture gave rise to the circumstances in which individuals collected and preserved forms of printed material that would otherwise have been destroyed (often by being put to other uses, such as wrapping food or doing service in the lavatory) along with the mass of free promotional material handed about in the street. Collectors in the 17th and 18th centuries created the conditions for an expanded interest in ephemeral print, which is only now moving into the mainstream of respectable scholarship.
Indeed, the act of collecting became a mechanism for repositioning cultural value of the slight and disposable literature of the streets: this is most evident with regard to two popular forms, ballads and chapbooks. Both were produced on a substantial scale at very low cost, and as such might have been thought unlikely to form part of the collecting interests of the book-centred library owner within the social elite. Ballads and chapbooks were published during the 17th century under a monopoly grant by a group of publishers, partners in the Ballad Stock, organized through the Stationers’ Company. However, because the grant did not prevent the intervention of others in this profitable and accessible area of the market, the ballad became the focus of long-running commercial struggles. The broadside ballad was printed in black letter on one or both sides of the sheet, usually in double columns, and sold for 1d. Ballad verse, often related to current events and combining information with entertainment, was usually printed under a woodcut pictorial heading. The scale of output was vast: about 3,000 titles were recorded in the Stationers’ Register during the 17th century; many were frequently reprinted and press runs were large. At his death in 1664 one publisher, Charles Tias, had about 37,500 ballad sheets at his house and shop on London Bridge. Such materials were eminently disposable. Although, among the lower social levels, their short-term destruction might be delayed because such publications were commonly used for decoration or to teach reading, their ultimate fate was almost certain.
The same might be said of chapbooks, which increased in number over the 17th century and probably overtook ballads in the scale of their distribution. Sold on the street, chapbooks came in a range of formats varying from duodecimos of 4 pages to quartos of 24 or more; the books sold for between 2d. and 6d. Also published by partners in the Ballad Stock and their competitors, chapbooks reached a prodigious level of output. For example, a 1707 inventory of the goods of the publisher Josiah Blare identified his holdings of 31,002 ‘great and small books’, kept in his shop at the sign of the Looking Glass on London Bridge. Blare was one of the group of printers and publishers involved in the chapbook market: the identity of members of the group is often obscure, but they may have numbered around twenty. Their commercial activity suggests the distribution of an enormous volume of material, mostly produced in London and sold throughout the nation by long-distance pedlars, commonly called chapmen, as well as urban hawkers and colporteurs. The chapbook was cheap, ubiquitous, and highly ephemeral. Copies from the 17th and 18th centuries have survived in very small numbers; by the 19th century, the form and its sellers, as recorded by Henry Mayhew, were disappearing as new social and economic conditions overtook the street trade.
A scattering of ballads and chapbooks, along with other kinds of ephemeral print, would have survived in miscellaneous private and public collections; however, because these holdings were constantly dislocated by death or changes in collecting policy, the historical analysis of print relies heavily on the survival of focused accumulations of such material by private individuals. The most important of the early collectors was Samuel Pepys, whose broad interest in printed material extended to the products hawked around the streets of London. His collection of ballads, which he added to the collection made by John Selden, contained at his death 1,775 sheets bound up in volumes and organized by subject. His collection of chapbooks numbered 215 titles, in a variety of formats, bound in eight volumes classified according to trade usage as ‘Penny godlinesses’, ‘Penny merriments’, and ‘Vulgaria’. Pepys’s collection of street literature comprises only a very small part of the total output, but it represents a means by which the ephemeral literature of the period can begin to be identified and assessed. The collection remained intact and passed, at the death of his heir in 1724, to his old college, Magdalene at Cambridge, where it has remained. As one historian put it, ‘The convoy of wagons which took the 3000 books and their twelve presses to Cambridge was a sealed train carrying Pepys’s reputation to posterity’ (ODNB). Among the books in the presses or book cases were the popular ephemeral items he had so carefully preserved.
Another important collector of street literature was John Bagford, a shoemaker turned bookseller, antiquary, and pioneering bibliographer. From his base in Holborn in London, he supplied the leading collectors of the day, including Pepys and the omnivorous Robert Harley, with ballads and more conventional forms of print. His own interests as a scholar centred on a never-completed history of printing and printed books. His own collecting was geared to this project: he acquired a large quantity of title- and other pages from derelict books (later used by Joseph Ames for his Typographical Antiquities), as well as a steady flow of black-letter ballads published from the Restoration onwards. At his death, the two volumes of ballads were acquired by Harley; they subsequently passed through a series of private collections, including that of John Ker, the 3rd duke of Roxburghe, before the British Museum Library purchased the collection, now in four volumes, in 1845.
Ballads had been entering the principal public collections from early in the 18th century, as libraries acquired quantities of other material in which many forms of ephemeral print were embedded. The collections of Anthony Wood, Richard Rawlinson, Francis Douce, and Thomas Percy were among those acquired by the Bodleian Library in Oxford. By the 19th century, institutions secured a critical mass of material (not always permanently), creating the conditions for research into it. The formation of societies (such as the Percy Society) and the publication of lists and bibliographies of street ballads began to move this genre of ephemera into a new relation with the printed archive.
A related category of highly ephemeral street literature was the almanac. Possessing a broader social appeal, it stood midway between recurrent forms, produced to supply an apparently continuous demand, and serial commodities, such as the newspaper. Among the most perennial products of print culture, the almanac was constructed around the calendar of saints’ days and holidays laid out in the preliminaries to the Bible or to the Book of Common Prayer. By the mid-17th century, it was produced and sold either as a small-format leaflet of up to 24 pages or as a folio broadside printed on one side of a sheet for public display. The Stationers’ Company held the monopoly for the calendar, and it licensed production of a changing list of almanacs under approximately fifteen different titles. These were sold in November each year in very large quantities. By the 1660s, an annual total of 300,000 to 400,000 copies were printed, enough for one in every three families in the nation. The numbers exceeded the production of even ballads and chapbooks, suggesting a pattern of consumption that reached far across the social scale. The Stationers’ commercial interest in this huge output was sustained throughout the 18th century and defended by a continuous and partially successful rearguard action against a variety of street-level interlopers.
The almanac was essentially ephemeral. Owners would most likely have got rid of it at the end of the year it covered, which meant the almost inevitable destruction of most copies. Aside from the earliest issues, out-of-date almanacs were not sought out by collectors; the relocation of this highly disposable form from the street to the library was tied to changing characteristics of its content and use. First, the calendar was supplemented by an increasing amount of material on a range of practical or entertaining subjects. Predictions of all sorts, the dates of local fairs, historical lists, timetables for gardeners, and medical information became part of the genre’s collective and individual appeal. Such material did not lose its currency every year, and it became common for all of the Stationers’ Company almanac titles to be bound up together in a decorative binding to be added to the library shelf. Some stationers themselves may have sold cumulative volumes in book form as a commercial enterprise. Secondly, from the late 17th century it became increasingly common for copies to be interleaved with blank pages for use as a diary or a personal record of events. This practice extended from the middling and elite to shopkeepers and farmers—indeed, to anyone with business to transact. Many surviving 17th- and 18th-century diaries were entered in the convenient framework of the almanac. The ephemeral form therefore took on a dual character, both as a throwaway item and as a durable component of the library. Nowadays, this duality can be identified in the publication of Old Moore’s Almanac on one hand and Whitaker’s and Wisden Cricketers’ almanacs on the other.
The transmission of street materials through collections, and the potential duality of such items, also characterize the newspaper. The most complex of the forms still (curiously) considered as printed ephemera, the newspaper poses a number of problems aggravated by the tendency to conceive of ephemera as constituting virtually all non-book print. The difficulty of locating the newspaper within the printed archive is related to the defensive position adopted by librarians hoping to secure themselves from the onset of an avalanche of print. Newspapers’ demands in terms of collection, storage, and access are, it must be admitted, almost too much to bear. But problems also arise from the difficulty of conceptualizing an alternative to the established hierarchy of book-down print. The idea that the newspaper is simply a disposable item along with, say, a knitting pattern, railway ticket, or bumper sticker is, regrettably entrenched.
Although the Encyclopedia of Ephemera is a useful guide to a wide range of obscure material, it nevertheless does have some significant limitations that reflect common problems in the study of ephemeral print. Ballads, chapbooks, and almanacs each have an entry, as does the newspaper. Its entry states that ‘a study of the subject as a whole is virtually impossible’, then provides a series of sub-headings: ‘First and last issues’, ‘Mastheads’, ‘Headlines/front pages’, ‘Commemoratives’, ‘Improvised newspapers’, ‘Mock newspapers’, ‘Language minority newspapers’, ‘Ships’ newspapers’, and ‘Curiosities’. The entry embodies the idea of the newspaper as a heap of discrete copies and fits it into a conventionally subordinate position in the hierarchy of print. There is no doubt that, at the point of consumption, the newspaper is an entirely ephemeral product. Created for the day, or some other limited period, it is produced for immediate use and, to some extent, predicated on equally immediate disposal. Its content is as current as possible and its format, geared to cheapness and the exigencies of competition, has a built-in disposability. This sense of immediacy is heightened by the presence of an increasing load of advertising of all sorts. After fulfilling their initial purposes, newspaper copies were applied to a range of mixed and largely non-literary purposes. By the early 18th century, these conventionally included lighting pipes, lining pie dishes, and fulfilling the needs of the jakes. As the scale of output grew and costs fell (following the repeal of mid-19th-century taxes), the newspaper began to manifest itself more clearly as litter. Victorian commuters arriving at the main London stations left behind huge quantities of cast-off copies to be thrown away or recycled. In this context, the association of newspapers with printed ephemera seems hard to resist.
However, the notion of instant disposability misses the point. To its early producers, the newspaper was a collectable form. Pages were numbered consecutively from issue to issue, and annual indexes and cumulative title-pages were often given away to encourage people to collect them. The inescapable fact about the newspaper is that it is a serial product and, in this respect, cannot be disposed of. Throw one away and the periodical flow will bring another one along behind. Periodicity is the mechanism and time the dimension within which the newspaper functions; these are the core characteristics that put the form at the heart of print culture. Continuously present since the first such London publication in 1620, the proliferation and expansion of newspapers have overtaken and dwarfed all the other forms of print put together. The numbers themselves are complex, and indeed alarming. By 1700, about 30 serial titles were in publication, producing a yearly total of more than 1,400 issues. If each is taken to have been printed in the low average of 300 copies per issue, the total annual output would have amounted to just below half a million copies. In 1750, the proprietors of the London titles, with the representatives of a widening circle of local papers, purchased about 7.5 million tax stamps, a number rising annually. The acceleration of output in the 19th century—linked directly to developments in the technology of print (see 11), as well as to the repeal of taxes—ushered in the mass market of the next century. The Daily Mail became the first Fleet Street paper to achieve circulation of a million copies for a single issue. At the same time, the newspaper moved beyond the orbit of the relatively conventional and sluggish book trade into its own industrial system. It was a sign of the times when, in 1937, the book trade’s much-venerated business organization was retitled the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers.
Despite this remarkable growth in output, the status and importance of the newspaper remained contested issues. At the end of the 19th century, for example, the idea of the newspaper press as the Fourth Estate was undermined by forms of commercialism rooted in the populist techniques of the new journalism. This undermining promoted the newspaper’s identification with ephemera. The fact that there is still no general, comprehensive history of English newspapers suggests that the process by which the newspaper was brought into the orbit of collectors and collections was more problematic than in the case of the less bulky and challenging forms of street print.
Collections of newspapers began to be formed in the mid-17th century when their importance as a contemporary record of events was first recognized. At the outbreak of the English Civil War, the bookseller George Thomason was pressed by Charles I in 1640 to compile an archive of contemporary materials by collecting newsbooks and related current materials as they appeared. Thomason continued the work until the Restoration, by which time he had collected some 30,000 tracts bound up in more than 2,000 volumes. Thomason died without receiving his commercial reward, but his cumbersome collection remained intact, passing through a variety of hands before its purchase in 1762 for the library of George III. It subsequently formed a part of the king’s gift of that library to the British Museum.
The wholesale collection of newspapers by a private individual became an increasingly hopeless enterprise; nonetheless, during the late 17th century, runs of the London Gazette (1665 to date) were occasionally advertised for sale to the public, and the binding up of selected titles seems to have remained fairly common. A few individuals have succumbed to the mania of general newspaper collecting. For the most part, however, private collections have usually had a specific purpose. Charles Burney—schoolmaster, book collector, and noted classical scholar—maintained an interest in the theatre, filling 400 volumes with newspaper cuttings, playbills, and prints on theatrical matters. From 1781, he filled a further 700 volumes with a retrospective collection of newspapers obtained at first from coffee houses. Similarly, the antiquary and printer John Nichols developed a particular interest in biography, publishing obituaries in the Gentleman’s Magazine of which he was the proprietor. By the time of his own death, he had built up a collection of newspapers that filled 238 volumes. Such projects indicated the engagement of a later generation of middling virtuosos with the serial publication of news and information. At the same time, from the 18th century, increasing numbers of people developed more limited collections of cuttings, adapted to their own personal use and assembled as part of their private record-keeping.
Although the personal collection of newspapers remained a fairly quixotic enterprise, a semi-automatic accumulation of this material was taking place in London and across the kingdom. From the late 17th century, the tendency for newspapers to pile up in public spaces (such as coffee houses), where access was offered to large numbers of readers, created drifts of serials. Without an active policy of disposal, serial collection was almost unavoidable. When, in the 1850s, Peele’s coffee house and hotel in Fleet Street attempted to sell its runs of major titles dating back to the 1770s, the collection weighed about six tons. It was eventually sold as waste. In political departments, lawyers’ offices, and businesses and institutions of all sorts, the steady increase in semi-automatic collection continued to take place.
However, for the newspaper and related serials to become more closely identified with the printed archive, a great deal more than the isolated action of individuals and casual, often unwitting, accumulation by institutions was needed. A major development in the formation of a comprehensive and systematic collection came when the British Museum was established in 1753. Even so, the process by which newspapers were incorporated into the library was long and painful. As with other forms of non-book material, the initial intake was both retrospective and marginal to the concerns of the Trustees. The Thomason collection of newsbooks and related items entered the library through royal bequest. Similarly, in 1818, the reluctant acceptance of the Burney newspapers was predicated on the purchase of his huge library of classical texts in book form. The Trustees refused to buy the Nichols newspapers, and, although some part eventually came to the British Museum, the bulk was not acquired by the Bodleian Library until 1865, the same year that the library’s Hope Collection of Newspapers—formed by John Thomas Hope (1761–1884) and bequeathed to the Bodleian by Frederick William Hope (1979–1892) had its first published catalogue.
During the early decades of the 19th century, the British Museum library became partially reconciled to housing the current output of newspapers, and made arrangements with the Stamp Office to receive copies of papers deposited at Somerset House in London for tax purposes. As the volume of output increased, conflict arose among British Museum officials over the handling of newspapers within their book-centred collections. As the whole collection was extended and overhauled, Anthony Panizzi’s appointment led to disagreements over the purchase of foreign newspapers (and over much else as well). In 1873, however, as the arrangements for taking in current titles were becoming problematic, the legal requirement for the deposit of books was extended to newspapers. The huge build-up in library holdings that accompanied this decision rapidly filled the Museum’s newspaper reading room, initially opened in 1885. The imbalance between the scale of the collections of newspapers and of books was becoming critical, and, at the end of the century the Trustees sought powers to disperse the foreign and local papers to their places of origin. A bill in 1899 proposing this measure failed, and a new solution was devised to remove the threat of the rising tide of newspapers and related materials. Land in Hendon at Colindale in North London was purchased; in 1910 it became the base for what is now the British Library Newspaper Library. It was a symbolic as well as an actual separation. On one hand, the split tended to emphasize the division between print in serial and book form. The two could not easily cohabit in a library setting, and the division lent credence to the idea of non-book ephemera. On the other hand, the creation of the Newspaper Library gave a new emphasis to the whole range of serial output as part of the national collection. Over time, the relocated material became a focal point within the printed archive, with its own storage and reading space as well as a specialist staff, and increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for collection and access.
This sort of redefinition through collection and integration gave serials, along with other forms of street material, a distinct identity. The notion of ‘printed ephemera’ could no longer accommodate materials that had become major elements in the printed archive. At the same time, from the 19th century, the view of what material was collectable and susceptible to cultural analysis had expanded. The vast, amorphous heap of print—generated over five centuries and relating to nearly every form of human activity—began to take on a clearer definition. The very act of identifying such selected elements within material generally regarded as ephemeral created a mechanism for the continuous reassessment of its value and use.
Pepys had included tobacco labels and trade cards in his London collection, and Bagford had a variety of similar scraps in his volumes. By 1800, a widening spectrum of individuals was becoming involved in collecting ephemeral material. Grangerizing, the extra-illustration of books, encouraged publishers to produce, and collectors to seek out, printed materials, drawn from an eclectic range of sources, to augment and personalize their volumes. Such items might include not only pictures of people and of places, but also oddities such as the printed labels once sold by booksellers and printers at winter fairs on the ice of the frozen river Thames. Contemporary and historic material was also sought after during the middle-class vogue for making scrapbooks and albums. Increasingly, more focused collections of ephemeral printed pieces were also assembled around such items as playing cards, bookplates, stamps, matchbox labels, bill heads, and trade cards, some of which came to be housed in major libraries.
The recognition in the 19th and early 20th centuries of the cultural and historical value of the vast and increasing range of print led to a more generalized identification of the scale and character of printed ephemera. This shift of perspective was encouraged by the creation of huge, open-ended collections in Britain and America. In England, the main line of interest was generated by John Johnson, ‘printer, ephemerist, and classical scholar’ (ODNB). Johnson started working at the Oxford University Press in 1915 and, in 1925, was appointed printer to the university, a post he held until his retirement in 1946. His contribution to the Oxford Press was considerable, but his long-term achievement as a collector of printed ephemera was equally great, if not greater. Taking an entirely open-ended approach, he sought out every form of fugitive print that was part of the ‘paraphernalia of our day-to-day lives’ and destined for the waste-paper basket after use (ODNB). His huge collection came to include more than a million items, mainly dating from the 18th century to his final cut-off date of 1939, though he had 16th-century material as well. It has been incorporated with several large specialist collections of watch papers, valentines, cigarette cards, and bank notes, which have remained intact as subsets within the collection. Johnson himself devised 700 headings for his material, which was already well known by the 1930s. Holbrook Jackson described it in Signature in 1935 as ‘a Sanctuary of Printing’ (ODNB).
Part of Johnson’s definition of ephemeral print was that it included anything a library would not accept as a gift; the Bodleian Library adopted a position in relation to anything identified as ephemera that echoed the British Museum’s response to the newspaper. Collections that included ephemera—such as those accumulated by Robert Burton, Wood, and Thomas Hearne—had long been identified as acceptable acquisitions. However, even in the 1930s a policy of exclusion continued to be applied, and moves were made to clear out calendars, advertisements, and modern illuminated items such as certificates and commendations as unwanted ephemera. The John Johnson collection, as it became known, remained in a semi-detached state in two rooms at Oxford University Press. It was only in 1968 that the Bodleian was reconciled to its existence and the whole mighty accumulation was transferred to new accommodation within the library under a specified curator, in the first instance the scholar and librarian Michael L. Turner.
The metamorphosis of the John Johnson collection both represented and contributed to a flowering of interest in the fugitive output of the press, both as an area of research in its own right and as an increasingly integrated component of academic studies. The collection offered a line of systematic access to the many varieties of print. General studies of the material in it started in the 1960s, and the collection itself has contributed directly to the flow of published information, most recently through a catalogue of its holdings of commercial ephemera (A Nation of Shopkeepers, 2001).
In 1975, Maurice Rickards set up the Ephemera Society in London; subsequently, national groups have been formed in America (1980), Australia (1985), and Canada (1988). Exhibitions, lectures, and publications have ensued. At the same time, a wide range of academic and other institutions have become involved in assembling and organizing their own collections. The Encyclopedia (2000) provided a list of 116 known holdings and, in a few cases, including Reading University and the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, courses on printed ephemera have been incorporated into the study of the history of the book. Part of this spread of interest in all areas of fugitive print has been the formation of an international network of ephemera dealers. In England, one of the most active was Andrew Block, who first opened a shop in northwest London early in the 20th century where he sold penny comic books for a halfpenny. In many parts of the world, ephemera fairs in various guises now run in tandem with their book-centred equivalents. Digitization is beginning to change the subject and its study.
‘Printed ephemera’ is an unstable concept, one that shifts according to the chronology of print, the circumstances of production and consumption, and the status of forms within established collections. The separation of books from the rest of the printed archive and the privileging of the codex—not only as a product intended to be preserved and stored, but also as the primary mechanism for cultural formation—seem increasingly untenable. Major libraries have become more aware of the value and interest of alternative varieties of print, and many artificial boundaries have begun to blur. Books are, in many cases, created from the materials that were produced and distributed in forms usually identified as ephemeral. The ebb and flow of their content in and out of serial publications, for example, gives print a much more fluid character than the serried rows of volumes on the library shelf seem to suggest. Similarly, books are surrounded by concentric circles of print relating to every aspect of their production, sale, and ownership, without which their content can hardly make sense. Book history has moved towards an interest in the reception and social context of print, making the issue of daily experience—and, therefore, of ephemerality—an integral part of its remit. It seems increasingly realistic to consider the products of the press as stretched along a spectrum of print, within which the book has (in physical terms at least) a modest place. In many ways the serial form has primacy in such a reconfiguration, mainly through the force of periodicity and the nature of a continuous sequence of production and consumption. The term ‘printed ephemera’ still has a value, but it should be used with care.
[Bodleian Library, Oxford,] The John Johnson Collection: Catalogue of an Exhibition (1971)
—— A Nation of Shopkeepers (2001)
B. Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press (1979)
F. Doherty, A Study in Eighteenth-Century Advertising Method (1992)
J. W. Ebsworth, ed., The Bagford Ballads (2 vols, 1876–8; repr. 1968)
G. K. Fortescue et al., eds., Catalogue of the Pamphlets, Books, Newspapers and Manuscripts Relating to the Civil War, Commonwealth and Restoration Collected by George Thomason, 1641–1661 (2 vols, 1908)
M. Harris, ‘Collecting Newspapers’, in Bibliophily, ed. M. Harris and R. Myers (1986)
A. Heal, The Signboards of Old London Shops (1957)
L. James, Print and the People, 1819–1951 (1976)
J. Lewis, Ephemera (1962)
ODNB
M. Rickards, Collecting Printed Ephemera (1988)
—— The Encyclopedia of Ephemera, ed. M. Twyman et al. (2000)
S. Shesgreen, ed., The Criers and Hawkers of London (1990)
M. Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories (1981)
M. Twyman, Printing, 1770–1970 (1970; repr. 1998)
E. Ward, The London-Spy, intro. R. Straus (1924)
T. Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (1991)
