What is Ephemera?
What is Ephemera?
Antique and Vintage Ephemera is an often overlooked genre of vintage collectibles that can be worth a nice sum of money to the right collector. According to the dictionary, ephemera is defined as "things that exist or are used or enjoyed for only a short time," or as "items of collectible memorabilia, typically written or printed ones, that were originally expected to have only short-term usefulness or popularity." Vintage Ephemera can include obvious choices such as newspapers, magazines, and post cards, or seasonal or holiday themed items such as wrapping paper, greeting cards, and decorations, or it could be an item that is commemorative of a special event such as a concert, fair, or community day, and even stickers, matchbooks, stamps, photographs, political campaign buttons, and other promotional advertisements. See tons of great examples at Ephemera Society of America's website.
In previous decades, ephemera was also called "Paper Americana" although, items do not have to be Americana to be considered ephemera. Basically ephemera covers a wide scope of items related to a person's everyday life that most people would not think were valuable to anyone else. This could include family photographs, old birthday cards, ticket stubs from concerts or movies, school or professional id cards, newspaper clippings, bookmarks, stickers, stamps, maps, and professional or personal correspondence such as letters.
More recently, people are collecting ephemera to create "junk journals", which is basically just another name for a scrapbook. To create a junk journal, gather any sorts of ephemera that could be glued, or otherwise secured to a piece of paper such as scraps of wrapping paper, ticket stubs, photographs, or magazine cutouts. Arrange the items however you would like on the pages of a journal and glue them in place. After you have decorated the pages you simply use the journal as you would any other notebook. To see a great example of a junk journal, and to get more step by step instructions, see the article "What is a Junk Journal? Junk Journaling 101 for Beginners"
People have been collecting ephemera, especially paper ephemera, since the Victorian days when decoupage was in its heyday. Back then, the practice was so common, companies would even release trading cards, or fashion their product labels in line with the various holidays. The images of these labels could then be cut out and used later to create holiday greeting cards to be given to friends and family. This is of course before mass produced printed greeting cards and is actually how the first Valentine's Day cards came to be. Read more on the history of the first Valentine's Day cards in my blog post or check out these weird antique ephemera Victorian Easter post cards in that post.
Searches for "vintage ephemera" and "antique ephemera" on both Etsy and eBay alike brings up listings for all sorts of bits of paper with either handwritten or printed writings and other colorful scraps of paper. There are listings for greeting cards, cookbooks, stickers, postcards, newspapers, matchbooks, pamphlets and even handwritten love letters from decades passed. You can purchase receipts, handwritten recipes, pages of antique books, trading cards, or even actual photographs. The reasons for collecting ephemera, as well as it's uses, are as varied as the items that can be classified as ephemera, are themselves.
To browse vintage and antique ephemera for sale at TheVintageVixenShop, click here. Or to shop our current monthly 30% off sale, click here. I hope you enjoyed this post on What is Ephemera? and I'll see you on the next post from TheVintageVixenShop! If you love TheVintageVixenShop, you will love our new T-shirts that we created with Spring. Check out the T-shirt and other apparel by TheVintageVixenShop for sale through the new SpringStore here!
Until next time, Happy Hunting!
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