Here are photos of my etsy shop update from today. Some vintage and nature inspired ephemera kits this time! :)
Please check out Feel Good Parcel for more info, and if you’re placing an order, please leave a message for me in the note section, saying you’re from Tumblr so that I can add some bonus bits for you!
One interesting piece from this collection of orphaned ephemera is a troop billet card for the U.S.S. Leviathan, a massive German-built steamship seized by the United States in 1917 and used as a troop transport during World War I. While we can’t quite make out the name penciled on the back of the card, we can (just barely) read the annotation below, which allows us to date this particular voyage:
Left New York Harbor June 15th 1918
Can anyone read the name of the soldier in bunk #895? While we can’t say for sure if the former owner of this card made it home from the War, the fact that the card survived gives us some hope.
During its tenure as a military transport, the Leviathan ferried over 119,000 American troops between the United States and Europe. After the War ended, the ship was refitted again to serve as a passenger liner for the United States Lines, and continued to sail across the Atlantic for another 20 years.
There’s a lot more to studying provenance than deciphering arcane inscriptions and other marks of ownership. Sometimes previous owners will leave other traces of themselves behind, like these loose items we’ve found stuck between the pages of many of our old books.
These pieces of ephemera, or transitory materials originally meant to be discarded after a few uses, have survived against all odds — in some cases for over 100 years — as forgotten bookmarks, safely tucked away and waiting for our librarians or catalogers to stumble across them.
Unfortunately, these particular ephemera are orphaned materials, their original sources unknown or undocumented. Where they might have come from, what books they were originally found in — these remain mysteries that we will probably never solve. But while their usefulness as pieces of provenance evidence is likely nonexistent, these fragile, rarely-preserved fragments of another time and place are still interesting in their own right.
Pictures of Women created by Female Artists using a variety of mostly found, all natural materials. Many of theses are collaborative creations by a duo of artists known as Sister Golden, while others seem to be from different artists. Vicki Rawlins, part of Sister Golden explains some of their creative technique
Nothing taped, nothing glued, just Mother Nature balancing delicately on itself. The actual act of creating each piece, for me, is therapeutic, spending lots of time outside walking and foraging, truly in the moment … There’s a freedom in knowing everything I’m doing is temporary … After I finish the piece, I document it with a photograph … The last step is to recycle it all back into the earth or into my next piece.
Illustrated by artist John Averill. The 1937 exhibition was presented by R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company in cooperation with the Art Directors Club of New York at the Lakeside Press Galleries.
Bottom:
1929-1930 Christmas and New Year card from the Lakeside Press.
The Lakeside Press was the printing firm of the R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company, where Chicago designer and typographer Burton Cherry began his career. Starting as a journeyman compositor and production operator, Cherry eventually worked as a designer under William A. Kittredge.
Images from “Fairfield Japan” (1912), a paper sample book produced by Strathmore Paper Company. The company began in 1892, in Mittineague, Massachusetts. Since then, it has become one of the leading suppliers of high quality art papers used worldwide.
1956 advertisement for Artype transparent, self-adhering acetate sheets featuring hand-lettered alphabets (”actual type faces […] selected by master typographers and designers”), numbers, reference letters, arrows, symbols, borders, and more in a range of styles and sizes.
