Okay. So I've called this two pieces of the jigsaw history through the John Dobson collection of printed ephemera.
So I just wanted to examine the term ephemera or as it's properly pronounced, ephemera, though nobody in the ephemera world calls it that.
It's a cumbersome term, rather academic for something so ordinary, something which is normally thrown away.
So what is a form? Or rather, what are they?
Because it is plural. Johnson used the term, the term, say, a summer of printing and printed ephemera.
In his correspondence, well before the term was established by the publication in 1962 of John Lewis's book Printed Ephemera, which I have here.
He was perhaps the first in Britain to define ephemera, albeit somewhat negatively.
Something they have suffered from ever since I took it.
He described a summer as everything which would ordinarily go into the wastepaper basket after use.
Everything printed, which is not actually a book.
And everything which a museum or library would not ordinarily accept as a gift and bear this last point in mind.
You could say that ephemera is just an umbrella term for a variety of mainly single sheet material.
A catch all for the ballads.
Advertisement. Scraps.
From the scraps raised souvenirs, trade cards and Christmas cards.
Bowman's verses. And Rory timetables represented here and also for tickets, menus, book markers, postcards, posters, election cards and flyers.
The list is extensive. The encyclopaedia of ephemera.
Best testament to this. The Centre for Ephemera Studies at the University of Redding's brand new Thesaurus also has a very,
very extensive and intricate definitions of all the terms that come under the umbrella of ephemera.
But the point about ephemera is that they transcend these genres and become pieces in the jigsaw of social and printing history.
Their charm and their importance is that they are chance survivals, which give us often unexpected insights into the daily lives of our predecessors.
But it is dangerous to infer too much racing from a single piece of ephemera.
Their effect is cumulative. The more restaurant menus we have, for example,
the more conclusions we can draw about what relatively affluent people like to eat in a certain time frame.
That's why an important part of my job is to refer people to other relevant collections and institutions or online.
And of course, ephemera are only part of the jigsaw alongside the more established and respected forms of books, manuscripts, maps and music.
It is remarkable, of course, that these fragile items have survived the subsequent journey to the bottom, and that's one of its special collections.
And onto our screen is more amazing still. Not to mention the inclusion of ephemera in numerous sporting and exhibitions, including Marks of Genius.
I would like to begin with a consideration of the founder, Donald Moderns Johnson, as a pioneer in the collection of ephemera.
Although not born in Oxford, John Dodson spent most of his time here.
He was educated at Morton Cottage School and then read grapes, followed by Arabic at Exeter College, becoming a paper ologist.
After a brief spell in the Egyptian civil service.
It was those excavations for papyri in Egypt which inspired him to ask himself what we were doing to preserve Egypt's paper heritage, he wrote.
Often I used to look over those dark and crumbling sites and wonder what could be done to treat the background
of our own English civilisation with the same care with which we scholars were treating the ancient.
Certainly he has illustrious predecessors in the collection of ephemera.
Among them John Selden, whose collection of ballots was continued by Samuel Pitts, who coined the term Bulgaria for these single sheets.
However, early collectors typically specialise in one or two specific areas of what are now considered ephemera.
As many, many collectors still do today. Johnson's vision was much broader.
Johnson himself paid tribute to six great men of his own time.
Well, just before who saw the truth that the waste, the ephemera of today are the true data of tomorrow.
Call them collectors or whatever you like. They were Robert Proctor, and it cannot be lost on the staff of the British Museum,
but whose ephemera came to the Bodleian, the Reverend W.T. McCrae, who worked at the Guardian,
AWP, Nicholson Wallace, librarian George Potter, Jack Kirby, founder of the Chiswick Press,
and Harry Keech, who founded the Dryads handicraft firm in Leicester.
However, Johnson recognised this in the breadth and depth of his own collection, he has created something new.
I think I can say that the width of these collections as they stand, has no other counterpart in the world collected on these on this wide area.
They render us open to the banter of the world. That he intended to be all embracing as underlined by his challenge.
As you can see, I challenge any to suggest any subject in which we can record no evidence at all.
Had he not been unfit for military service when the First World War broke out, Johnson might never have formed the collection.
Returning to Oxford, he secured wartime employment at the Oxford University Press as assistant secretary of the delegates of the press.
After the war, he remains the becoming princess of the university between 1925 and 46.
The press was an ideal environment to form his Museum of Common Printed Things or the sanctuary of printing, as it was often called.
Officially, it was named the constant means memorial collection of ephemeral printing after
the benefactors who as well as passing on to him ephemera collected by her great
grandfather bishop passive to himself an ephemeris to use an anachronistic term
enabled him to furnish the full form of Bibles printers office that the press,
which you can see here to house his growing collection. It's as important and humbling to remember that this was Johnson's hobby.
Dodson collective retrospectively, except in certain areas.
For example, developing technologies such as the telephone, the Marconi Gram and private presses where he knew the printers.
He felt strongly that the farmers should survive by chance rather than design.
1939 was his cut-off date. We have virtually no ephemera from the Second World War, the 1940s, fifties, or most of the sixties.
Johnson's curation of his own collection was innovative.
He can lead to both the organisation of his collection from library technique fall coats with the state of the art at the time and clearly impossible.
After all, you'd need at least one, if not three or four cards for each item.
In terms of physical storage, Johnson established different colours for each of his main headings.
His perfectly ordinary file boxes were found by apprentices at the press, and they also taught letter labels for them.
You can see them here courtesy of later colour images of the collection in the new library.
After the structured grew 680 subject headings which you will find online.
In protecting his collection from the from the lights and from greasy fingers.
Dotson was again innovative at a time when many collectors, including Pelosi,
wonder who is establishing a parallel collection at the New York Historical Society, were using scrapbooks.
Jobson used good quality paper offcuts from the press to mount his collection.
Only his method of hindering have caused.
This problem is just too brittle to enable the verso or last page of any document to be folded flat for reading.
Most important recently for digitisation. So what are these main things?
I'll read them because this is being political.
So advertisements, arts and architecture, artists, authors, book trades and publishing history, educational entertainment form or genre pastimes.
Political. Religious, social and economic history. Printing processes.
Prints. Private presses. Sport. Topographical transport and travel and holidays.
The 680 subject headings you can see arrange both alphabetically and onto these main themes online.
Jonson's Maxim was let the material sort itself.
There is no one sorting principle.
You can apply certain programs or arrange by venue advertisements, by product, education by place, transport by mode of transport and so on.
The type of index Dotson and his assistant,
Lillian Russell establish merely indicates that the subjects are represented in each section and how they were arranged.
We produce the same sort of indexes now, albeit in PDF form.
So where did the material come from?
Johnson's position at the press meant that he had many contacts in the book signing world who sent him bundles of ephemera and a network of consent.
He avoided advertising too much what he was doing, fearful that the market would catch up with ephemera, then deemed of little monetary value.
He was right. It has to. Articles about the collection were published in the typographical journal Signature.
However, in 1926, the Council of the University rejected, after ten years in decision,
the parliament collection of postage stamps and postal history stocks and rescued what he could of this with his own money.
Even more significantly, when solicitor up collecting ephemera, the opium was actually actively disposing of them.
The elimination of a new clause of the statute enables the curators to eliminate from
the library material of no literary or artistic value or of an ephemeral nature,
which it is not in the interests of the library to include in the general catalogue or preserve on the shelves.
These eliminated the ephemeral but passed to John Dodson by the first keeper of printed
books from Gibson and came back with the acquisition of the collection in 1968.
There was no private property in the collection. Early in its formation, it became a university collection.
When Johnson died unexpectedly in 1956, the press retained the collection for a further 12 years,
recalling Johnson's assistant, Lillian Russell, to look after it. She companies it to the battalion.
Amazingly, it would only take them 30 years for the body and to do a complete fuss.
In 1971, the body mounted an exhibition of five for 259 items or groups of items to a slightly bemused public.
So you can see from the reviews here. Ironically, the library was then in the vanguard of what is now known as Ephemeral Studies.
The catalogue of the exhibition is still the standard work on the formal formation of the collection and its online.
So using the collection, we do, of course,
have real readers here in the Western Library looking at real documents for which they do need that e-tickets,
but they don't necessarily need to be scholars.
People use the collection for a variety of reasons, but the focus of this talk is inevitably on the resources that I can show you here.
It's important to realise only a small fraction of the material is catalogued and digitised.
About 100,000 items of about a million and a half.
Since those original indexes of John Dodson and the curation of the collection has certainly involved an interesting,
unforeseen and unforeseeable wave in terms of physical storage.
The collection is not just as Johnson left it. Books have been waiting for boxes and added to the separate sequence of Johnson books.
Sections have been rethought as an index. Housing has been improved with the addition of melanchthon acid free folders so that we can
create an acid free environment without having to dispense of Johnson's original pound boxes.
This is inevitably meant that the collection has expanded. Items have been taken off their mounts when digitised.
The reason I explained earlier and remounted with Japanese paper pre 1960 material has been added to Johnson's original boxes in small quantities.
And a decision was taken to collect contemporary ephemera when the collection came to the library in 1968.
We simply cannot afford not to do so. We collect intensively for major events such as the Queen's Jubilee, the Olympics elections and so on,
but also generally and I put on the table some ephemera that I picked up yesterday morning.
This is not a time, the time to discuss the pros and cons of such contemporary collecting, but it is an interesting problem.
By far, the most far reaching change has been the advent of computers which have revolutionised what we can do with ephemera.
We have been fortunate to undertake many projects with with staff in quite a lot of cases.
And in the case of the ProQuest project, there were ten of us.
I'm very fortunate to have been in post before and after the computer age or during, I should say.
Computers enable us to make connections through cataloguing,
make the collection known outside the library, create virtual collections through digitisation.
The arrangement in Johnson's original boxes, however logical,
is always only one of the ways in which ephemera could be arranged and through OCR optical character recognition,
search the text of the items themselves, which adds a whole new layer of access.
The firm are ideal candidate for digitisation. Of course, often the whole document is a single sheet, so you can see the whole thing on the screen.
Many of them are designed to attract. Many of them were innovative with new printing processes such as rainbow printing or compound plate printing.
The key to all this is cataloguing or metadata curation beyond the scope of the index.
As we looked at earlier, cataloguing is not normally designed to make people sit up and look interested.
And indeed, I will spare you much detail. Suffice it to say this ephemera have traditionally been the best in the wall of catalogues.
That's partly why they have languished so long in libraries. They are difficult.
They just don't behave decently like books. There is rarely a title worthy of the name.
Rarely an author, rarely dates. And rarely an imprint.
Cuts in cataloguing them can take an awfully long time too, for a scrap of paper or records or long, often even longer than this.
Well, ways of cataloguing books, maps and music manuscripts electronically were quickly established.
There is still no standard for ephemera.
Given that I am one of the very few former librarians in the world and that ephemera are held not only in libraries but at museums,
archives and local history collections. And each type of institution has evolved a different method of cataloguing.
This is scarcely surprising. We have evolved our own system, readily exportable into other formats for projects, for joint projects.
And I am very grateful to my colleagues, David Honeywell, for setting this up, maintaining a migrating it.
And Thaddeus Lipinski for creating the catalogue webpage complete with images.
The text format, which is very detailed and aims to create as many cross-reference as possible, is online.
We ain't catalogued as much detail as we possibly can to make as many collections of
connections as we can between items and we digitise when project funding allows.
Scarily, however, a lot of scholars seem to believe that we've catalogued and digitised everything overnight.
So I have to remind everyone that we have only catalogued 100,000 of a million and a half.
With the exception of two projects, toys and ballots, all our catalogue records are on our own site.
Searching and browsing is fairly basic, with the records in both display and bibliographic forms.
There is much to explore through our website and the leaflet I have put at the front will
tell you how to find the various resources which I am really going to with through.
You can find motor cars and other forms of transport through the Toyota project, the building's first digital project.
Political Cartoons and creative professions. Prince.
Trees, Courts and Our Nations of Shopkeepers exhibition, which was the first one, an exhibition to go online.
Boardgames. Writing planks or schoolboys.
Pieces and 18th century entertainment.
But our busiest project was in partnership with ProQuest called, somewhat confusingly, the John Dobson Collection, an archive of printed ephemera.
It focuses on just five areas of the collection advertising 19th century entertainment,
crime, murder, film executions, popular prints and book traits.
Everything else we have catalogued or digitise falls outside its scope and needs to be accessed through our own site.
You can access this project as well as set free of charge in the UK through higher education, further education, schools and public libraries.
But you can't just sit at home and type the URL and hope to gain access.
It uses exactly the same metadata as on our own website, which much more functionality than our own online catalogue.
This is a quick tool. You can browse and search.
You can view the context of the item so you can actually see how they are arranged in the boxes as if you were going through the boxes themselves.
You can search within the text of documents with hitch highlighting.
You can filter the results. So here's a search for further benefits of but filtered by method of production on silk.
Or hear a name search for Alan Terry, but filtered by advertisement.
There are tailored separate search screens for each of the five areas.
So you can find out who we have in terms of the material in the collection.
Who was transported for sheep stealing, for example? The iconographic content of the material is indexed.
Do you think so? The three. And there's a lightbox facility which enables you to save the images you particularly like.
These can be emailed to people. So I do most of my inquiries this way.
And if you click on a thumbnail, as long as you're inside the project, it will take you back to the relevant item.
All the nice features of Zoom. Onscreen measurement in both dimensions.
And rotation. So what is the importance to scholars of this material which escaped the wastepaper basket?
It is invidious to pick on just a few items, especially in isolation, as the strength of memory for research,
as the cumulative story they tell in the cross-references as much as in the minutiae.
However, I have tried to pick examples which cast interesting sidelights on history.
Here we have posters or playbill.
In the case of the left, the two of really often indistinguishable, showing a variety of entertainments you would expect in a single evening.
These posters for 1842 and 1884, respectively,
show the effectiveness of display type printed in black and red or blue and orange to orientate the reader towards the main themes.
But the details of the spectacles of the Voxel Gardens poster and smaller type of course fascinating to us.
The performers prices, refreshments and the availability of boats.
Right at the bottom we learnt that.
We learned that permission has been given to the proprietors of the state carriage which belonged to the Emperor Napoleon and
which was taken on the field of Waterloo to be exhibited within a handsome tent erected on the stage of the Ballet Theatre.
On the right from the poster from the Canterbury Theatre of Writers in 1884.
That's again a rate, an array of entertainments which include in the Trenches,
which is an episode from the Crimean War that took place 30 years earlier.
So it shows that although ephemera all of their time, they are also interesting in showing us how long events state of the public consciousness.
We have a good collection of mothers electrocutions broadsides with some of the most grisly images in the collection.
These broadsides carried illustrations of the crime the criminal prison cells.
Court scenes or hangings. All those are represented in the slides.
These broadsides are formulaic, typically including verses and last dying words, almost invariably expressing penitential and pious sentiments.
On the left, the murder of Jane Jones by Daniel Goodes in 1842.
In the centre chase of Connor, executed in 1845 for the murder of Mary Brothers.
And on the right, a multiple hanging in 1916, which exemplifies the poor quality of these quickly produced execution broadsides
the printer created didn't have a block available for three hangings,
so he just added two of the criminals to the edge of the sheet.
These were the gutter press of the time, and they were sold at the scene.
I am particularly fascinated by trade cards and especially trade since lists such as this one,
which give us a wealth of information about the nature and provenance of merchandise.
This beautifully engraved example for John Light, dating from 1795, shows us the breadth of produce sold by an oilman.
Many of these goods remain luxurious and exotic today.
Pineapples were, of course, much prized at that time. Barbary were an acid red berry, but Argos were a relish made of the row of the mullet old Tunny.
The last reference to these in the Oxford English Dictionary is dated 1852.
There is much more to be done with ephemera in terms of the etymology or even the first use of words.
The problem is that ephemeral, often not dated because they are of their time.
There was no need to date them. The same is frustratingly true of ephemera today.
I haven't looked for. So I imagine that those items that I picked up yesterday rarely half the year.
In this particular case, the Verso has been used as a bell and so we do have a date for May 1795.
And Lisa, in case you couldn't read it on screen. Transcription from our catalogue of the items that the fold in that.
Bill. And of course, with the manuscript content on the Verso, you often get additional items.
Also dated by Bill on the Verso is this beautiful engraved traits card for spills rebukes straight.
The bill made out in 1759 to Lady Betty or Elizabeth Harcourt, daughter of Simon Harcourt.
First O Harcourt to Stanton Harcourt. So tying in neatly with all manuscript collections.
Benjamin Morgan's letter press trade card gets details about the trees and acids
milk as well as chewing a typical shop sign of the time and dates from about 1793.
From the train card, it was a manhattan.
We have evidence not only of a woman in trade with her husband rather than, as was quite common, a widow carrying on a business,
but also of a son who is intentionally damaging the business by claiming to be in partnership with his father.
We also have evidence of the combination of chimney sweeping with empty necessaries and a change of address.
Although frustratingly again, without a date, it's around 1850.
The last trade cards for Castle Marlborough is fascinating, and the riddle relates to sending cheese by the equivalent of mail order.
But the claim that these cheeses will bear a voyage to the West or East Indies,
the BE or a stump reveals another source of Johnson's ephemera, the British Records Association.
Johnson formed his collection with a dual purpose to document printing history and social history.
Ephemera are very important in terms of printing history. As often experimental techniques are used to create them.
The three bill here of 1879 is printed by Rainbow Printing.
The Drury Lane Silk label of the 15th May 1800 was reputedly dropped by George the third, when a second attempt was made on his life that very day.
The Hazard Lottery bill is printed by the anti forgery Congreve compound plate printing process process
where two finely engraved plates linked separately and brought together to be printed in one impression.
This enables the fine white lines to run between the two colours almost impossible to
achieve by registering the plates in the normal way for printing in two impressions.
This embossed item was printed by Whiting and Branston and dates from the last year of Lotteries 1826 before their recent revival, of course.
The collection is full of wonderful examples of chrome lithography. The label for the Royal Jubilee Stationery Cabinets 1887 is just one printed by
Charles Goodall and son who were famed for playing cards on Christmas cards.
And finally, a wood engraving with ornamental type Laura is surprisingly difficult to date.
Anything really from 1863 to 1890, though I would favour an earlier date rather than the later one.
Design history pervades the collection.
I've chosen just two examples from the 1891 French design version graphic in 1892 and the author Dudley Hardy's famous Gaiety Girl of 1894.
This slide shows the names of colours which were used in the 1890.
I think that's quite an interesting sidelight on art colours and printing colours, and in this case, colours of dyes and some distemper.
The John Johnson collection is by no means a local history collection, but it is very strong in provincial ephemera.
I've chosen some examples from Oxford to make the point.
Family historians whose ancestors are likely to be represented in the collection.
Performers, tradespeople, artists and so on can use all names indexed fairly easily.
Optical character recognition software has transformed access to the textual contents of letterpress ephemera.
Previously underexplored. So I searched for the words Pon Technica and that brings us to its origins as a bazaar with arcades used to store furniture.
The collection includes not only a description of this new phenomenon,
but the regulations for the storage of wine and cellars and an advertisement for Smith's patent Metallic Chimney Linings,
which was the sixth and last item on the document we first saw.
I just put that at the top there. The pan apparently had 150 of these chimney linings.
And on the side,
typical of ephemera tells us that the metallic chimney lining will supersede the odious practice of sweeping chimneys by climbing buoys,
prices and illustrations.
I'm sure it's much more this much more than you could possibly hope to find in the contemporary press or in secondary literature.
Clearly, a Chinese pun Technica was added a few years later at the same address that we have.
The predecessor of the modern meaning of the term. With the horse drawn furniture removal cart.
With apologies for the poor slide in that case. So this brings us to genius, which though 1206 results in a keyword search of the ProQuest project,
it is rare for textual ephemera to be used in body exhibitions.
Usually they provide some welcome colour or images, but this element was not needed in Steven Hebron's very visually attractive displays.
Genius is a difficult concept too in terms of the ephemera as it is usually somewhat retrospective.
Steven has focussed instead on the misuse of the term genius by unscrupulous advertisers and promoters.
To remind you of some of the items he selected. He states.
In the caption, Lavie asks What the ephemera of our lives as dots and called it has to do with genius,
which is exceptionally rare and stands apart from the ordinary concerns of daily life.
Ever since the world acquired this meaning, however,
sales people have had no scruples about using it for their own ends and have cheerfully called upon it when promoting something.
It is a sign of the extent to which the word has woven its way into the language
that it may be used to describe the highest reaches of creative achievement.
What is set to stand the test of time and equally find a place in the more ephemeral worlds
of fashion and the market supporting the hyperbole of the salesperson and the critic.
More of the ISS. And I can't leave the subject to the U.S. as to which of them are put without mentioning ephemeral studies and material culture,
because this has become a study field in its own right.
As I mentioned, there is a centre for a feminist studies of reading and encyclopaedia of ephemera and thriving ephemera societies in Britain,
the USA, France, what it's called Bolivia, Papua, Australia, New Zealand and Denmark.
So what is currently happening in the collection? Our work is a microcosm of the library ready acquisitions, cataloguing, inquiries, outreach.
I'm basically on my own, but have a wonderful team of volunteers, some of whom you can see.
In this flight with some visitors from Sweden and some of whom are present in this room.
They all have their own projects are huge help.
Our office is now in the Western Library. That's it. The top left readers look at the material in the rare books of manuscripts reading room.
A major part of the work at the moment.
Having moved the collection out of the new library four years ago, is preparing for its return to the Western Library.
Some of my volunteers are sorting the backlog of pre 1960 ephemera.
At the moment,
another volunteer present here processes the library's book jackets and that includes all the dependent libraries others are cataloguing.
We now have a new web interface. So one of them is cataloguing book plates.
Also here present and others are cataloguing postcards and a new collection of games which we acquired called The Bottom Collection.
Modern ephemera is also thought of by a volunteer. We acquire antiquarian ephemera by purchase and donation, including whole collections.
New collections recently acquired all the collection of Gaines,
the John Fraser collection of propaganda postcards and most recently, a large collection of trade cards and buildings.
And as well as that, that's really an exhibition where the collection is not represented.
We've spoken of the genius exhibition Dress Clock for Coming Beauty display.
It's going to be a vaccination display and a major exhibition on history and entertainment, and they will all feature the collection.
We even made it into one an Arthurian legend through a theatre program.
That's an advantage of the Western Library. It's a seminar room for curators can introduce ephemera as a resource to new generations of scholars.
We work closely with the English and history of art faculty, and I have history of art students on curatorial placement each year.
And finally, these days it is easy and fashionable to promote collections through social media.
I have limited time for these, but plenty of enthusiasm.
So we have a John Johnson Collection blog about the collection and a Summer Resources blog about other collections which is tagged.
Of course, I tweet and retweet more often, retweet, and those feed through to a delicious page.
I did eventually establish a Facebook page and I use Instagram to showcase our backlog finds.
So this is the end of my tale, if you will excuse the pun.
But what next? Oh, for crystal ball, as far as I'm concerned, personally,
I want to look backwards as well as forwards and document the history of the collection as well as getting it to an as good state as possible.
Physically, under terms of online finding AIDS,
we have some rest of all travelled a long way and we have all contributed on our various ways to making it
unthinkable to exclude ephemera from the historic record for generation of future generations of future scholars.
It is undeniable that new technologies are enabling ephemera to leap out of dusty corners of institutions onto our screens,
and as a result, the usefulness of ephemera to inform historical research is growing.
Ephemera have taken their rightful place here as elsewhere as evidential data alongside books, manuscripts, maps and music.
Not bad when you consider that they were being eliminated in the 1930s.
John Thompson, who once wrote that he dropped his collection A Form of mine,
a miniature typographic wing of the Bodleian, was, in my humble opinion, not only a pioneer, but a visionary.
I hope that he would be pleased with this revolution and above all, the youth which scholars are making of his collection.
Thank you.