Ephemera Books Plus

We are pleased to announce Ephemera Books Plus, a tool enabling you to explore your collecting or research interest by genre or theme. It encompasses not only books and articles, but blog posts, web pages, podcasts and videos on YouTube and elsewhere. It is intended for novices and experts, collectors and scholars, anyone and everyone. It stands now at 3,000 entries but is very much work in progress!

You will find it here

Far from being a dry, academic exercise, I am finding that research for the bibliography is an exciting quest — an eye-opening voyage of discovery, leading me down hundreds of rabbit holes to find resources that I only wish I had known about sooner.

Sometimes our world of ephemera seems tiny, niche even. But building the bibliography has shown me just how very wide it is. There are so many genres, so many subjects, so many institutions and collections worldwide to explore through their publications, blog posts and online exhibitions. We have come so far: from the true pioneers going back to Samuel Pepys, John Bagford, Isaiah Thomas or Sarah Sophia Banks, to those (such as John Johnson, John Lewis, Maurice Rickards and Michael Twyman) who formed the concept of ephemera into a coherent field, to the scholars of today who do not question the validity of ephemera to their diverse subjects of study. The term ‘ephemera’ brings together separate collecting fields as pieces of a jigsaw of social and printing history.

Ephemera Books Plus also plays a role in documenting the evolution of ephemera studies. There is much to say about this, but not here!

The bibliography has been nearly 50 years in the making! According to Patrick Robertson’s Chairman’s report of September 1992 (Ephemerist 78), it was first mooted in the early days of the Society but not actioned until some time in the late 1980s. Work, when it did start, was impressive: a joint effort of the Ephemera Societies of the UK, America, Australia and Canada. The transatlantic and Australian entries were collated by William Helfand in New York and then sent to England. By June 1993, Patrick noted in The Ephemerist:

From the bibliography team comes news that they have now assembled all the items to be included. Peter Jackson, Valerie Harris, Sally de Beaumont and Patrick Robertson have been meeting regularly to order and edit the bibliographic offerings of all nations. In a final effort to keep the bibliography up to date, you are invited to send in titles of anything published since the beginning of 1991.

It did not get as far as the intended desktop publication, but there were hundreds of file cards, arranged by subject and genre, with initials (including my own I was amused to note) indicating who suggested many of the references. I am grateful to the Centre for Ephemera Studies, where the cards are carefully preserved, for making them available to me. Modern technology, in the form of the wonderful, user-friendly software Zotero, has made it possible to make all this hard work available online, with the bonus of adding multiple cross-referencing. Zotero’s ‘collections’ (folders) make it easy to explore according to the interests of the user.

There was, of course, the little matter of filling the gap from 1993 to the present. For this, I am using various sources, among them the ‘Bookstack’ reviews in The Ephemerist and the lists of books and articles appended to various individual entries in The Encyclopedia of Ephemera.

For recent sources, we tend to assume these days that a few clicks of a mouse will magically create a bibliography. Interestingly, they won’t. It doesn’t help that a search of library catalogues for ‘ephemera’ will mostly bring up books on insects! Searching for ‘printed ephemera’ is little better as it presupposes that cataloguers have consistently applied the term to books on topics as diverse as valentines, broadsides, invitations, crests or menus. In practice, each has to be searched for separately. Furthermore, even though the Library of Congress Subject Headings were first published in 1898, it wasn’t until electronic cataloguing became widespread nearly a century later that their potential was realised. Despite conversion of non-electronic library catalogues, subject headings have rarely been applied retrospectively to records created without them on slips or file cards. And that is before you get into defining the scope of ephemera!

However, if you have a title and author, records can be easily uploaded to Zotero from electronic catalogues and bibliographic resources, such as JISC Library Hub, WorldCat, Google Scholar and JSTOR. And these catalogues will take you on fascinating journeys through a labyrinth of rabbit holes: start looking for one book and you might find ten others.

Books and articles are, however, only part of the story in an age where people principally look for information online. Blogs are very accessible and effective ways of promoting collections or writing about subjects of interest without the blood, sweat and tears of academic research. Podcasts, YouTube videos, etc are grist to the mill, although I did decide that social media were too transient, indeed too ephemeral and too informal, to include.

We hope to keep Ephemera Books Plus free for all, not just members, hence the button asking for donations. It is bound to be woefully incomplete and will of course need constant updating. I will inevitably have overlooked the obvious as well as the obscure. Please let me know. There is a form for the purpose. Thank you

 

Julie Anne Lambert

Ephemera Resources