Holiday Inn London Bloomsbury
Coram Street
London WC1N 1HT
United Kingdom
Entry £3 · 11am - 4pm · All welcome
Members from 10am with membership cards
Interested in booking a table for the fair? Reserve your space - download the 2018 booking form
For more details call 01923 829079 or email
Join us! The Ephemera Society is always pleased to welcome new members. Payment can now be made online via PayPal.
Bloomsbury Ephemera Fair
29 April 2018 · 9.30am - 3pm
The fair will include all of the following: books, ephemera, maps, prints, posters, postcards, photographs and many unusual printed items across the whole of the Galleon Suite.
Now celebrating its 61st year, and coming to Battersea Park for the first time in 2018, this major three-day event is one of the largest and most prestigious antiquarian book fairs in the world, showcasing rare, unique and unusual items from 160 plus leading UK and international dealers.
The Fair is the jewel in the crown of Rare Books London, a new week-long festival celebrating old and rare books, with special events and behind-the-scenes activities for bibliophiles. From medieval manuscripts to modern signed first editions, visitors to the fair can literally hold history in their hands as they view and buy museum-quality books, maps, prints, photographs, manuscripts, ephemera and original artwork.
Only 40% of women got the vote in 1918. Working class women and under 30s had to wait another 10 years.
This exhibition features archive items and objects from the Women's Library collection – including three banners, sashes, badges and much more – to show the campaign methods of the three main groups for women’s suffrage, the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) and the Women’s Freedom League (WFL).
It concentrates on the last (and often bitter) years of the long campaign of the struggle for women's right to vote from 1908 - 1914, with the inclusion of prison diaries and leaflets detailing tactics, such as 'rushing' the House of Commons.
Printing a modern world: commercial graphics in the 1930s
Until 19 August 2018
A display of items from the National Art Library’s Jobbing Printing Collection, which opens a window onto daily life in the 1930s, offering a striking and original visual experience of a period when economic and political turbulence formed the backdrop to innovation and new ideas such as Modernism.
The Collection was developed between 1936 and 1939, when Philip James (then Deputy Keeper of National Art Library at the V&A) requested samples of work from many high-profile companies and designers across Europe and North America, as well as Britain.
His intention was to create an ‘open reference collection of commercial typography so that the trend of typographic design, both in this country and abroad, could be appraised by students’.
The Object of My Affection: Stories of love from the Fitzwilliam collection
Until 27 May 2018
Love is very much in the air in this exhibition, which contains objects alive with the range of emotions that it commands; from admiration and affection, joy and passion, longing and despair, to insults, indifference, grief and remembrance.
The exhibition will showcase the Fitzwilliam Museum’s collection of valentines, which date from the eighteenth century to the twentieth and include a wide variety of sentimental and decorative types as well as comic examples.
Alongside the valentines will be an assortment of other objects relating to the theme of love, including posy rings, love tokens and works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) and James Gillray (1756-1815).
All human life is reflected in a toothy grin. This upcoming exhibition will trace the evolution of our relationship with our teeth and with the profession that has shaped the way we live with them - or without them.
Following modern history's tireless pursuit of the pain-free mouth and the perfect smile, this is the first exhibition to look at how dentistry evolved from fairground entertainment to highly-skilled profession with many associated educational campaigns and spin-off industries.
Including beautifully illustrated treatises dating back to the early 18th century, Teeth will draw on the wealth of images, objects and artworks held in the collections assembled by Henry Wellcome, supplemented by loans from key collections in Northern Europe. It will explore oral hygiene and dentistry as markers of medical progress, and vividly illustrate the enduring connections between 'good' teeth, beauty, vanity, wealth and success.
2018 marks the 100th anniversary of America’s first major military engagement in the Great War 1914 – 1918.
Side by Side: America and World War I, will uncover the relationship between the US, and Europe, as well as reflecting on those who went into battle, and those who stayed at home.
Criminal Lives, 1780-1925: Punishing Old Bailey Convicts
Until 16 May 2018
Between 1700 and 1900, the state stopped punishing the bodies of London’s convicts and increasingly sought to reform their minds. From hanging, branding and whipping the response to crime shifted to transportation and imprisonment.
By the nineteenth century, judges could choose between two contrasting forms of punishments: exile and forced labour in Australia, or incarceration in strictly controlled ‘reformatory’ prisons at home. Which was more effective?
This exhibition traces the impact of these punishments on individual lives, following the men, women and children convicted in London from the crime scenes and trials through their experiences of punishment, and on to their subsequent lives.
Poster Girls will highlight some of the key female artists who have designed for London Transport and Transport for London including Dora Batty, Herry Perry, Laura Knight, Anna Zinkeisen, Margaret Calkin James and Freda Lingstrom.
The artists and featured work will be examined and contextualised by both the era in which they lived and worked and their style, looking at influences both from within the design community and from the wider world.
As well as stunning original posters from London Transport Museum’s collection, Poster Girls will include accompanying material such as letters, ceramics, photographs and original artworks.
The New Union Charade Fan depicting twenty-four riddles c1801
Technological improvements meant that by the mid-Eighteenth century, fans decorated with printed rather than painted designs were gaining in popularity. They could be manufactured in quantity, at speed and most importantly, at reduced cost. Fan retailers and print publishers were quick to catch on, churning out engraved or etched designs on paper mounted to sticks plainly fashioned of ivory, bone and wood – affordable to most levels of society.
Folding fans were no longer an accessory associated only with the very wealthy. An anonymous fan painter attempting to maintain his artful trade observes that women took up printed fans (somewhat theatrically referred to as ‘the Evils’) with enthusiasm. Polite society was aflutter with political trials, military propaganda, social satires and more. In fact there was hardly a subject that did not appear in some form or another on the leaf of a printed fan.
Early Printed Fans brings together a diverse array of fans from The Fan Museum’s unrivalled collections, and offers a unique and fascinating perspective on the cultural, political and social atmosphere of Europe in the long Eighteenth Century.
All human life is reflected in a toothy grin. This upcoming exhibition will trace the evolution of our relationship with our teeth and with the profession that has shaped the way we live with them - or without them.
