Ephemera

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Laissez les Bons Temps Rouler!: Mardi Gras Memorabilia

February 24, 2011 in Ephemera, Holiday & Patriotic by admin | No comments

1891 Mardi Gras New Orleans Carnival Krewe of Rex Ball Invitation

1891 Mardi Gras New Orleans Carnival Krewe of Rex Ball Invitation

It’s not hard to imagine escaping to the French Quarter, especially with Ohio’s frenetic winter weather constantly vacillating from sleet to snow to freezing rain and back again.  A warmer climate, some beignets, and all the sights and sounds of Mardi Gras seem awfully appealing!  But I have to content myself with escaping via the database to a Mardi Gras of years past.

Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) and the Carnival that accompanies it are celebrated around the world, but no other festivities rival those held in New Orleans.  The full spectrum of Mardi Gras – parades, masquerade balls, parties – has been taking place in New Orleans since the early 1700s, and the memorabilia from these celebrations is very collectible today.  Of course, you can find beautiful masks, but most of the material centers around the krewes and their activities.  A Mardi Gras krewe is a sort of social fraternity (although they sometimes do charitable works as well) with dues-paying members.  Krewes hold the various balls and parades associated with the festivities, and memorabilia from some of the oldest krewes is especially desirable.  Krewe favors, like this silk scarf or a number of jeweled pins, are lovely, but I’m fond of the gorgeous ephemera, like this proclamation for a Mardi Gras king, or the beautiful invitation (pictured above) to a ball that’s reminiscent of illuminated manuscripts.  These objects make it clear that the good times have been rolling in New Orleans for a long, long time!

-Hollie Davis, Senior Editor, p4A.com

To search the Prices4Antiques antiques reference database for valuation information on hundreds of thousands of antiques and fine art visit our homepage www.prices4antiques.com.

An Ornamental Collection: Kugels: Early Christmas Ornaments

December 16, 2010 in Ephemera, Holiday & Patriotic by admin | No comments

Christmas Kugel ornaments, green and gold grapes

Christmas Kugel ornaments, green and gold grapes

When most people hear the word kugel, they think of the Jewish pudding, but kugel is actually a German word for a ball or a sphere, which is how kugel also came to be the word for early German glass Christmas ornaments.  Christmas kugels appeared around 1840 and probably made great inroads in England and America thanks to Queen Victoria, who made the German version of Christmas that she was raised with fashionable after she took the throne.  Kugels weren’t originally intended to hang on Christmas trees.  Most likely, they were “end of day” pieces made by glass blowers who were simply trying to blow the largest glass bubble possible.  (Many different media forms have “end of day” work – small unique objects made from leftover materials at the end of the day, often as little trinkets or gifts, they’re highly sought after by collectors today who consider them folk art.)  These large glass kugels often hung in doorways and windows rather than on Christmas trees.

When they did make the jump to Christmas ornaments, originally, they were just the very simple glass balls that we think of as traditional Christmas decorations today, but by the 1880s, they were beginning to appear in a variety of forms: grape clusters (like the ones pictured above), teardrops, pinecones, etc.  Molten glass was blown into a mold and then broken off at the neck.  The jagged edge of the neck was smoothed down so a little metal cap with a hook could be applied – the same design we see today.

Because of their ephemeral nature and because they were handled so frequently, early Christmas kugels didn’t survive in great numbers, so they’re very collectible today.  The challenge is accurately assessing their age.  And German glass ornaments were a staple of Christmas decorations until well into the 20th century, so if you’re looking for something more than the basic globe, you’ll not be disappointed.  You’ll find clowns, dogs, Indians, Santas and even beetles!  So take a close look when you’re unpacking those ornaments that have been passed down through your family – you might find some real surprises on your tree as well as under it!

-Hollie Davis, Senior Editor, p4A.com

To search the Prices4Antiques antiques reference database for valuation information on hundreds of thousands of antiques and fine art visit our homepage www.prices4antiques.com.

Back to School Collectibles

August 11, 2010 in Boxes, Ephemera by admin | No comments

A Moveable Feast: Vintage Lunch Boxes

1954 Adco Superman lunchbox

1954 Adco Superman lunchbox

Seeing all the back-to-school sales makes me long for my old metal lunchbox.  Maybe it’s still out there somewhere, picked up by a Holly Hobbie collector.  (I hope they were able to get my name in Mom’s bright red nailpolish off the front.)  Of course, metal lunchboxes are probably classified as weapons in elementary schools today, but collectors are still snatching them up whenever they get the chance!

There probably aren’t any real surprises here – metal is more popular than vinyl, having the original thermos to accompany the lunchbox is important, and examples from the 1950s, 60s and 70s are the most popular.  And, of course, the more iconic the image captured, the better!  Dudley Do-Right will get you around $3,500, but Superman, of course, can fetch over $11,000, especially early images like the 1954 one pictured above.  And, of course, it’s hard not to love the kitschy appeal of The Monkees.  From Roy Rogers to Star Wars, there is really something for everyone, so, if you’re getting bored with brown bags, get on eBay, track down your first-grade lunchbox and bring a little zip to your lunch hour!

Pencil in Time for Collecting: Vintage Pencil Boxes

Spirit of St Louis lithographed tin pencil case

Spirit of St Louis lithographed tin pencil case

My other favorite part of going back to school was getting a pencil box and filling it.  (There was no joy in shopping for clothes.  I think I probably just need to say “corduroy” and you’ll all know what I mean….)  Pencil boxes just seemed so neat and organized, and all those new pencils and crayons seemed so fresh and hopeful somehow.

Pencil boxes are still really collectible, although there aren’t as many of them out there, perhaps because they’re so useful for organizing tool drawers and desk supplies, even if you’re not in grade school.  Still, the database offers some interesting options, like a carved antique example or the historic tin box with Charles Lindbergh and the Spirit of ’76 that’s pictured above.  We’ve also got Flash Gordon, Pinocchio, Girl Scouts and more, so even if you can’t hang onto pens, you can find a way to store them in style!

-Hollie Davis, Senior Editor, p4A.com

Cataloguing a Collection: Ephemera and Research

July 2, 2010 in Advertising, Ephemera, Pottery & Porcelain by admin | No comments

Leeds Pottery Trade Catalogue

Leeds Pottery Trade Catalogue

Thank goodness for online shopping, which is the only thing that stands between me and an annual deluge of mail-order catalogues.  They tend to pile up along with my intentions to look through them (and actually start holiday shopping early) before I finally give in and recycled them.  Of course, they’re ephemera; that’s what’s supposed to happen to them.  It’s hard to imagine, but who knows how valuable these catalogues might be to future generations of researchers seeking for information on how we spent our money, decorated our homes, chose our prize possessions?

Catalogues are some of the best resources we have when researching material culture history.  Census records, probate files and wills may all help tell us where people lived and what they owned, but when it comes to getting a clearer picture of exactly what those objects looked like and how much they might have cost, catalogues are crucial.  Curious about how many kinds of parasols you’d have been able to choose from?  You can browse through a catalogue!  For people interested in the larger picture of trade routes, style influences and the wages and costs associated with manufacturing, catalogues also help fill in gaps.  Looking through old catalogues with images like the Leeds pottery catalogue, pictured above, can tie an object to a particular maker, thereby making it more valuable monetarily or academically, and in some instances, as is the case with the catalogue from the International Exhibition of 1862, it’s possible to positively identify and verify a unique object while piecing together more of its history like those produced for display at the Exhibition.

The first catalogue of the Library of Congress

The first catalogue of the Library of Congress

You’ll find catalogues for everything from early twentieth-century Coca-Cola advertising campaigns to movie poster catalogues designed to help theater owners to select their promotions to nineteenth-century catalogues of American Indian photographs taken by some of the great Western photographers.  (It’s not a commercial catalogue, but I can’t talk about catalogues without sharing this first printing of the Library of Congress’s catalogue – it’s 10 pages!)  Catalogues and other such ephemera can have great value not just with historians but with collectors as well, especially those with complete collections who want to round them out with documentation, so check the database if you’re cleaning out an old workshop or office.  And meanwhile, think of the possible future rewards the next time you’re beating yourself up for still having that stack of outdated catalogues piled up on the back of your desk.  Remember that while the modern world may chastise a pack rat, historians everywhere bless the pack rats of bygone eras every day!

See all Ephemera > Catalogues in the p4A database.

-Hollie Davis, Senior Editor, p4A.com

Memorializing Memorials: Antiques and Death

April 22, 2010 in Ephemera, Miscellaneous Antiques by admin | No comments

Victorian mourning earrings & brooch with hair under glass

Victorian mourning earrings & brooch with hair under glass

Memorial Day may have only been a federal holiday since 1967, but the practice had already been a common one for about 100 years at that point.  Tending graves had always been a deeply-respected family tradition for many families, and this began to spread to a community level after the end of the American Civil War.  Memorializing the deaths of loved ones though is an age-old tradition, and you’ll find a wide variety of examples of the ways people have done this throughout history.

Some memorials are difficult or even distasteful to us today, like postmortem daguerreotypes. It’s hard for us to imagine today, with folders, both physical and virtual, full of photographs of our loved ones, but at the time, especially with a young child, the only way to keep an image of a loved one might have been to take an image of him or her after death. In some sad instances, you’ll even see daguerreotypes of children clearly on their deathbeds, with parents taking advantage of what might be the final opportunity to capture an image of their living child.

Many people also channeled their grief into making memorials. Throughout the late 18th and 19th centuries (especially during the reign of Queen Victoria, whose mourning of her husband, Prince Albert, took the rituals of grief to a whole new level), we routinely see mourning memorials made in a variety of crafts. You’ll find elaborate needlework embroideries and watercolors of traditional scenes (most commonly one or two women dressed in mourning near a tomb surrounded by weeping willows – the women here have real hair embroidered for theirs) and extraordinarily delicate examples of hair art, often encased in jewelry like the set pictured above. As the 19th century wore on, the desire and demand for mourning ephemera even lead the ubiquitous Currier & Ives to create prints that consumers could purchase, fill in with their loved one’s information and frame, even going so far as to create partially printed Civil War memorials to be filled out with the names of all members in a regiment.

But memorials weren’t just made for members of one’s immediate family. People also created memorials for historical figures, like John Paul Jones and Zebulon Pike; especially with the deaths of Washington and Lincoln, when the entire nation was in mourning, the marketing machine kicked into overdrive, with the names and images of the dead appearing on everything from rings to ribbons, pins to porcelain. Death never takes a holiday, and apparently, neither does the desire to memorialize those who pass on.

-Hollie Davis, Senior Editor, p4A.com

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