Exploring Ephemera

As an intern in the Print and Photograph Department, I work frequently with the Library Company’s ephemera collection. Ephemera – a term first defined by Maurice Rickards in 1988 as the “minor transient documents of everyday life” – is a growing field of study, and the Library Company has an excellent collection that includes everything from broadsides to trade cards. I have been processing the Brightbill Postcard Collection through funding provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities in order to prepare a selection of the collection to be available through ImPAC, the library’s digital catalog.

While processing the postcards, I’ve noticed the incredible variety in the collection. The Brightbill collection contains images from all over Philadelphia, including automats, trains, hotels, schools, libraries, parks, hospitals, and even window displays in the subway! These images offer a series of views of Philadelphia from famous monuments to daily scenes. 

St. Joseph's Hospital

Postcards were introduced in the United States in 1861, when John P. Charlton of Philadelphia acquired a copyright for an unstamped “postal card.” The US postal service did not allow the use of the phrase “post card” by private publishers until 1901, and the divided backs that we know and use on modern postcards (message on one side, address on the other) were not allowed until 1907 (Rickards 249, Werther and Mott 12). That is why there is often text written along the edges or over the image of early postcards!

Young Friends’ Association Building, Philadelphia, PA

One of my favorite postcards is also an advertisement for Horn & Hardart Automat. The postcard shows the interior of “One of the Fifty Automat Cafeterias in Philadelphia and New York” alongside illustrated instructions on how to use an automat. I love the illustrations that accompany the text, and how the card is designed to catch your attention. This is a good example of how postcards were used for advertising products and services.

 

Horn & Hardart, How an Automat Works

Check out the rest of the Brightbill postcards on ImPAC at http://www.lcpimages.org/inventories/brightbill/sampleimages.htm,  and see the Library Company’s flikr account for even more images! http://www.flickr.com/photos/library-company-of-philadelphia/

Lydia Bello

Print and Photograph Department Intern Spring 2012

Rickards, Maurice. The Encyclopedia of Ephemera: A Guide to the Fragmentary Documents of Everyday Life for the Collector, Creator, and Historian. Edited by Michael Twyman, Sally de Beaumont, and Amoret Tanner. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Werther, Mark and Lorenzo Mott. Linen Postcards: Images of the American Dream. Pennsylvania: Sentinel Publishing. 2002.

Marking African American History Month

In 1926, Carter G. Woodson initiated Negro History Week, which during the bicentennial was expanded to Black History Month. Created to celebrate the achievements of African Americans, Black History Month also recognizes the central role played by people of African descent in the history of the United States. In recognition of Black History Month we were very fortunate to have Professor Carla Peterson visit with the Library Company’s Program in African American History. In the inaugural Black History Month program, Professor Peterson introduced her newest publication, Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York, to a very engaged audience. Although Professor Peterson’s work focuses on 19th-century New York, her talk incorporated a broader discussion about slavery, freedom, race, and gender that was applicable to African Americans in antebellum Philadelphia. Professor Peterson’s talk reminded history lovers that freedom was experienced and expressed by members of the black elite all along the east coast. Peterson’s fascinating family tree introduced a vibrant group of black entrepreneurs, politicians, and religious leaders to audience members. By focusing on her great-great grandfather Peter Guignon and great-grandfather Philip White, Peterson traced the forgotten stories of New York’s black elite who lived before and during the Civil War. 

The stories found in Black Gotham serve as a reminder of the buried past. We are indebted to Carla Peterson, and to other scholars, who make it their mission to uncover the past and to incorporate it into the larger narrative of American history.

Erica Armstrong Dunbar

Director, Program in African American History

Check out the Library Company's upcoming programs

Angry Birds

Back cover of The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present (Philadelphia, 1839). [Gift of Michael Zinman]

This book cover has such interesting gold stamping. The unusual design of the four corner brasses incorporates images of animals in the swirls and curlicues.

 

The birds look so determined as they fly under the ornaments!

 

I particularly love the roaring lion with his tongue sticking out.  If you look closely, his tail has become one of the swirls of the corner piece, although it’s in the wrong place to attach to his body properly.

Jennifer Rosner

Chief of Conservation

Mr. Rementer’s South Philly Pear Orchard

Screen shot of Greater Philadelphia Geohistory Network’s Interactive Maps Viewer with detail of Samuel L. Smedley’s 1862 Philadelphia Atlas: http://www.philageohistory.org/tiles/viewer/

 I was recently contacted by James Rementer, a descendent of a South Philadelphia family that owned a pear orchard on Irish Tract Lane for more than a century before it was covered with landfill in the late 1800s. Though long gone, Irish Tract Lane was located in the vicinity of 18th and Wharton Streets (see above map). Mr. Rementer forwarded the below article printed in the July 1872 issue of Gardener’s Monthly and Horticultural Advertiser, mentioning his family’s orchard.  The author describes venturing into the doomed orchard to document the pear trees before the encroachment of over six feet of fill.  Executed for the purpose of supporting an underground sewage system in South Philadelphia’s marshy landscape, the fill would soon blanket most of the area.

July 1872 issue of Gardener’s Monthly and Horticultural Advertiser, retrieved from:
http://books.google.com/books?id=viwCAAAAYAAJ&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Adam Levine, an historian for the Philadelphia Water Department, recently presented his findings related to South Philadelphia’s buried topography at the Grid + Flow symposium held at Temple University in April 2011.  In his research here at the Library Company, he was able to track down the following image illustrating how the fill drastically altered South Philadelphia’s landscape.  In the lower left hand quadrant of the below photograph, one can see how the grade advanced upon existing farmland and structures in the vicinity of the Philadelphia Rapid Transit car barns, which now serve as a bus garage for SEPTA, on the site of the present-day Acme at 19th St. and Oregon Avenue.

Philadelphia Rapid Transit Car Barns, photograph by Aero Service Corporation. Ca. 1930.

One wonders if any pre-row home estates still exist today and, from my own findings, it appears as though Stephen Girard’s estate, Gentilhommiere (seen in modern photograph below), may be the only 18th-century structure remaining after the fill.  If anyone can correct me, I’d be glad to know of other existing historic structures south of Washington Avenue that may have survived the fill, other than those closer to the Delaware River.

Modern-day Photograph of Stephen Girard’s estate, Gentilhommiere, by the author.

Nicole Joniec
Print Department Assistant & Digital Collections Manager

The Mourner's Gift (1837)

Connie King writes:

Much as we send sympathy cards today, Americans gave small volumes of consolation literature to people who were in mourning during the early decades of the 19th century. In recent years, the Library Company has been able to acquire numerous examples of the genre in order to preserve this aspect of the elaborate cultural response to death in the antebellum years. Recently, with funding from the Davida T. Deutsch Women’s History Fund, we acquired a title that had eluded us previously: The Mourner’s Gift (New York, 1837). The book is small (less than 3 x 5”), which is typical, because the books were intended to be very personal. Edited by a woman, The Mourner’s Gift contains poetry by various writers including Mrs. Sigourney (“A Father to His Motherless Children”), Hannah Gould (“The Widow’s Lullaby”), and others.

When the book arrived, we discovered that The Mourner’s Gift had many gifts in store for us.

Close-up with raking light

Andrea Krupp writes:

This little book is beautiful in so many ways.  As a conservator with a special interest in 19th-century bookcloth, I noticed that the silk had been lined with a thin paper, which was common practice for silk bindings. But the cloth itself was unusual. Typically, silk-covered bindings from this period are decorated with a moiré, or “watered” pattern, a type of fabric which was probably borrowed from the dressmaker’s stock and brought into service as a book covering material.  But this is the first example I’ve seen of a damask woven silk cloth on a book. The wear around the edges demonstrates why this delicate material was not well-suited for bookbinding. Another unusual feature is the stamped design on the front and back covers. The result is awkward compared to other blind stamping from this period, but it is the first time I have seen such stamping on a silk-covered binding. But beautiful it is– and an extraordinary example of the out-of-the-box thinking that characterized bindery operations in the 1830s.