Musings on Collecting the Present
One of my favourite quotations is this, from John Selden’s Table Talk (published posthumously in 1689):
"Though some make slight of libels, yet you may see by them how the wind sits: as, take a straw, and throw it up into the air, you shall see by that which way the wind is, which you shall not do by casting up a stone. More solid things do not show the complexion of the time so well as ballads and libels." [leaflets, bills or pamphlets defaming someone’s character]
It is difficult to view the ephemera of our own times dispassionately and to double-guess how historians of the future might see us through surviving ‘transient documents’. Samuel Pepys, the figurehead of our Society, notably collected the ‘vulgaria’ (broadsides and ballads) and other ephemera of his own time and these take their rightful place in his Library, preserved at Magdalene College, Cambridge.
During a trip to London, three things made me think anew about contemporary ephemera and about John Johnson’s contention that ephemera should survive by chance not by design, particularly in the context of the digital age.
In his erudite Holden lecture, ‘Tickets and trifles: ephemeral print and Restoration England’ (given on 30 October 2015 at Senate House in connection with the exhibition ‘Spineless wonders’), Professor Jason Peacey presented the vicissitudes of the foundation of the Post Office in 17th century England, principally through surprisingly copious and detailed ephemeral documents collected and annotated at the time.
Prominent in ‘Spineless Wonders’ (18 June – 29 November 2025) were much more modern items from Senate House Library’s Heisler Collection (https://www.london.ac.uk/about/services/senate-house-library/collections/printed-special-collections/heisler-collection), testifying to one man’s determination to document the political struggles of the political Left in our own (and earlier) times, through ephemeral pamphlets and flyers. This large and diverse collection, including subjects such as health issues, Greenham Common and the Paris protests of 1968, is already much studied.
There was, however, another, rather unexpected, element to my visit to London - one notable not for its ephemera but for the lack of them. I had lunch at a restaurant and was astonished to find that the only printed menu was the daily prix fixe: otherwise everything, wine list included, was accessible only through a QR code. I have, of course, been aware of QR codes affixed to pub tables, but usually in addition to a printed version. So, is the printed menu disappearing? This is a powerful case for including contemporary menus in collections, as indeed exemplified by our Chair, Dickon Weir-Hughes, who balances historic menus with the airline menus of the frequent flights necessitated by his international lectures.
There are, of course, many other examples of the gradual and (expected) disappearance of major genres of printed ephemera: railway companies’ once ubiquitous posters prematurely proclaiming the death of the paper ticket in 2018 – 2019 at least gave due warning. In 2020, Argos announced the last hard copy of their catalogue, symptomatic of a general decline in store catalogues (although I am bombarded by mail order catalogues, issued with astonishing frequency!). To my surprise, I struggled to find ordinary tourist postcards in Paris during a recent trip. Tourist brochures, once the stuff of dreams, have been largely superseded by websites and television advertising. What will be next? Add to that the environmental encouragement to declutter and recycle and we are in danger of throwing away the paper detritus (or, to ephemerists, treasure!) of our lives.
Articles in previous issues of The Ephemerist have touched on collecting contemporary ephemera, often in the context of collecting on a shoestring. Examples include bookmarks, compliments slips and till receipts.
Many institutions, among them the Museum of London, V&A Archive of Art and Design, the John Johnson Collection at the Bodleian Library and the London School of Economic Science, have been collecting contemporary ephemera for decades, partly to ensure the survival of this vulnerable material and partly because the market in ephemera would now preclude collecting them retrospectively.
When invited to share his thoughts on the Ephemera Society’s 50th anniversary, our former Chairman Patrick Hickman-Robertson’s comments chimed with the ideas above. He wrote:
I want to pass on a modest proposal while I have the chance. I collected vintage magazines, generally speaking any news-stand publication prior to the year of my birth, 1940. But in the late 1960s, living in Chelsea at the time of Swinging London, hippies, Mary Quant and Tariq Ali and the ‘alternative society’, I became attracted by the publications that represented this phenomenon, known collectively as the Underground Press. So I started buying every issue of every title, IT, Oz, Suck, Spare Rib etc, and for the $100 annual subscription to America’s Underground Press Syndicate received most of the American titles through the post. Although all British publications were required by law to submit a copy of every issue to the six copyright libraries, few hippie publishers complied, so my Underground Press Archive was probably unique in its completeness.
The reason I am telling you this is to emphasise the importance of husbanding the ephemera of our own times. We live at a time of turbulence but that in itself presents ephemerists with new opportunities. I do hope that there are members who have collected the ephemera of Brexit and of Covid and has anyone considered the possibility of the ephemera of the culture wars, of woke? So my message is simply this: the next 50 years will see at least as much social change as the last 50 years. It will need to be chronicled and that will be done so much better with the aid of what Maurice used to call ‘the evidence’, and by that he was referring to ‘the minor transient documents of everyday life’.
Do you collect contemporary ephemera? If so, you are not only documenting a precious corner of history but adding your own interpretation, by your choice of items and by the way in which you arrange your material. Please tell us about your collection, and your motivation. And happy hunting!