Tag Archive: 0ephemera

Apologies for the recent lack of blog posts.  Things have been so busy: exhibiting at the Boston book fair, processing some recently acquired collections, trying to find someone to come and work for me, and preparing for California.  In cataloguing for the latter, here’s one little item which caught my eye: A small etched and […]

By 1919, all low-value coins in Germany had vanished, due to a shortage of metal, a shortage which gave rise to a printed phenomenon known as Notgeld, or ‘emergency money’.  Neil MacGregor explains: ‘as there was no longer an effective national currency for the lower denominations, every town and city had to make its own.  […]

I am currently putting some things together for a new catalogue.  This will be included: a spurious will by which the testator, the ‘superabundant’ Mary Hughes, in 1758 distributed various parts of her body to, among others, a Bedfordshire clergyman, the King of Prussia, the Royal Society, and the Fellows and Scholars of Trinity College, […]

During the 1960s, Uwe Wandrey (b.1939) was involved with the group Hamburg Linksliterarisch and the APO (Extra-Parliamentary Opposition movement), opposing the Emergency Acts (Notstandgesetze) of 1968 and the Vietnam War.  He was also active as a political songwriter, founding his own publishing house, Quer-Verlag, to help support the cause.  This little book, Kampfreime (‘combat rhymes’), published in […]

In the century before cinema and television changed our lives forever, there were other ways of creating moving pictures.  One such inventive Victorian method was the zoetrope (from the Greek zoe, ‘life’, and tropos, ‘turning’), ‘a mechanical toy or optical instrument consisting of a cylinder open at the top, with a series of slits in the […]

‘During the 1930s Royal Air Force music became well established with the two bands gaining a reputation for innovation and musical excellence.  In the lead up to World War II there was a huge expansion of RAF Music Services with many civilian professional musicians being drafted directly into the new ensembles.  Additional military bands were […]