Tag Archive: 0ephemera

‘Without a play-bill’, stated The Tatler in September 1830, ‘no true play-goer can be comfortable.  If the performers are new to him, he cannot dispense with knowing who they are: if old, there are the names of the characters to learn, and the relationships of the dramatis personæ: and if he is acquainted with all […]

I am currently cataloguing some new material in preparation for the Boston Virtual Book Fair next week. Here’s one such item: ‘This elaborate house-blessing [which measures 412 × 325 mm], issued in the 1820s by Johann Ritter and Company of Reading … provides a unique poetic blessing rather than the common prose versions and the shorter […]

As many will know, ephemera has been an interest of mine since I set up the business (ten years ago this year!). Recently, I discovered a genre of which I was previously unaware: fancy printed greetings cards from eighteenth-century Germany, using colour and silk. Here is a New Year’s card, the etching printed in blue, […]

This week we received the printed copies of a catalogue that has been in the works for some time, and have finally mailed them out. Published to mark my tenth anniversary as an independent bookseller, it has been years in the making.  Many people know me for selling Russian material, but in fact my interest […]

Who doesn’t love a good wedding? And, more importantly, who doesn’t love a good party favour? Here’s a fun party favour of sorts we’ve recently stumbled across, and included in our latest e-list: the Hochzeitszeitung, or ‘wedding newspaper’. It is a genre of occasional printing found in German-speaking countries. Normally they are bespoke, something to […]

As I wrote last week, we have been working on a new catalogue, British Music: 200 years of performance, public and private.  It’s been enjoyable putting it together, doing the necessary research, and making some discoveries.  Here’s one: This little engraved card (114 x 78 mm) is an apparently unrecorded song, written in support of […]