This website seeks to encourage researchers and collectors to discover and study obscure ephemera that document American culture and life.  Worldcat reveals that most of the items that I post cannot be found in more than a few research libraries–often none at all.  Alternately, research libraries do not bother to catalog ephemeral publications like these.  I believe, however, that because these were distributed free, or at nominal cost, to consumers, they were the publications most likely to make their way into homes and be read by large numbers of Americans.

I acquire pre-1960 examples of the kinds of publications that prove so useful when scholars study 19th-Century America.  The limited competition that I encounter for them suggests that libraries, which could easily outbid me, have little interest in post-Civil War and 20th-century ephemeral publications in general.

I try to anticipate what materials future historians will find useful.  Being an historian first and a collector second, I organized this website to encourage others to do this too—even if this means new competition for me. I am aware that I could be wrong in prizing particular ephemera or even whole classes of ephemera.  I may even be wrong to encourage scholars to study obscure ephemeral publications; these may be obscure for good reason.

Ephemerastudies.org will permit me to share with others the information and imagery that I am acquiring, and to benefit from the knowledge, intelligence and experience of other scholars and collectors.  Please contact me with your impressions of the site.

~ Saul Zalesch

Title

Thomas Nast; Franco-Prussian War
Category
Booklet, gallery
Date

1871
Why It's Interesting

This is the Thomas Nast edition of an English allegory about the Franco-Prussian War.  It has 33 small-to-middling Nast illustrations.  Well over 100 libraries report owning this volume, yet it sells for more at addall.com than do the rarer items posted on this site.  [And oddly enough, new reprints of it are often priced as high as original copies.]  This suggests several possibilities.  The herd instinct exists with librarians as with all other groups, and for a publication to be respectable, a certain number of libraries must own it.  Second, respectability and demand are more important than rarity in giving an ephemeral publication market value.  Third, collectors, like libraries, want “names,” not works by unknown writers/illustrators/publishers etc.

Again and again I find on ebay that items that are completely unknown–in no library collections–sell for low opening bids.  Of course, these may be obscure for a reason, but many of them, at least in my opinion, possess significant aesthetic or documentary significance, or even both.  [Quite a few end up on this site.]  The general indifference to them is baffling and unfortunate.
 
Thomas Nast; Franco-Prussian War Thomas Nast; Franco-Prussian War