#catalogue of ephemera

[apoemaday]

Catalogue of Ephemera

by Rebecca Lindenberg

You give me flowers resembling Chinese lanterns. You give me hale, for yellow. You give me vex.

You give me lemons softened in brine and you give me cuttlefish ink. You give me all 463 stairs of Brunelleschi’s dome.

You give me seduction and you let me give it back to you. You give me you. You give me an apartment full of morning smells—toasted bagel and black coffee and the freckled lilies in the vase on the windowsill. You give me 24-across.

You give me flowers resembling moths’ wings.

You give me the first bird of morning alighting on a wire. You give me the sidewalk café with plastic furniture and the boys with their feet on the chairs. You give me the swoop of homemade kites in the park on Sunday. You give me afternoon-colored beer with lemons in it.

You give me D.H. Lawrence, and he gives me pomegranates and sorb-apples.

You give me the loose tooth of California, the broken jaw of New York City. You give me the blue sky of Wyoming, and the blue wind through it.

You give me an ancient city where the language is a secret everyone is keeping.

You give me a t-shirt that says all you gave me was this t-shirt. You give me pictures with yourself cut out.

You give me lime blossoms, but not for what they symbolize.

You give me yes. You give me no.

You give me midnight apples in a car with the windows down. You give me the flashbulbs of an electrical storm. You give me thunder and the suddenly green underbellies of clouds.

You give me the careening of trains. You give me the scent of bruised mint.

You give me the smell of black hair, of blond hair.

You give me Apollo and Daphne, Pan and Syrinx. You give me Echo.

You give me hyacinths and narcissus. You give me foxgloves and soft fists of peony.

You give me the filthy carpet of an East Village apartment. You give me seeming not to notice.

You give me an unfinished argument, begun on the Manhattan-bound F train. You give me paintings of women with their eyes closed. You give me grief, and how to grieve.

[derangedrhythms]

You give me flowers resembling moths' wings.

Rebecca Lindenberg, Love, An Index; from 'Catalogue of Ephemera'

[dawcats]

DAW flyer June 1990

[safyresky]

Okay another aside bc today is a Neat Day at work,

When the semester starts up again and classes return, Special Collections is FUN bc we have classes come in to see a selection of our books pertaining to their course and it's always SO SO COOL

One of the things about class prep though is grabbing the books from The Vault, bc usually, since it's SC/RB, the curator asks whichever tech (there's two of us) is fetching items for the class to grab the item (if there's multiple copies) with the most interesting provenance and such, or like a dust jacket, but usually in best condition!

We're predisposed now to look through the books for interesting provenance, inscriptions, etc., even if it's not a duplicate copy, so it's always a Cool Time. ESPECIALLY because, due to past lacklustre cataloguing practises, about 80% of the time when we find a cool provenance it's not in the record and our curator is like 😤😤😤 WHY didn't they NOTE THIS!

And then we get to note it! And this is one of my FAVOURITE parts of the job 🤩🤩🤩

So yesterday/today I had a bunch of books for an English Class on controversial Canadian literature (v cool sounding course), and one of the items we brought up was a catalogue of banned books from the 18th century (ish). It was written in LATIN, had The Good Paper (rags, not pulp), bound in VELLUM, so it was. you know. A thing you'd be like "Oh yeah! this should deff be in rare books/special collections!"

Wanna know what ELSE it had?

That WASN'T in the record?

IT HAD:

TWO different ownership inscriptions

(Dated 1756 and 1916, respectively)

(One was a priest/Monk; the other was a doctor so. how did this go from the CHURCH to a DOCTOR, AKA, RELIGION TO SCIENCE? HMMM)

Bookseller's ticket (stamp)

AND IN THE BACK! A LETTER! WRITTEN BY ONE OWNER EXPLAINING WHY HE GIFTED IT TO THE OTHER OWNER!

AND WAS ANY OF THIS MENTIONED?

NO!

So I got to update the record and make the letter a little item file and then the curator and I tracked down the person the letter was FOR to a church in about 1966 and how COOL is THAT

SO FUCKING COOL

[llovelymoonn]

favourite poems of february

avery r. young peestain

claudine toutoungi future perfect

david rivard bewitched playground: "not guilty"

brian kim stefans the future is one of place

lisa gill post-traumatic rainstorm

clare pollard pinocchios

rebecca lindenberg love, an index: "catalogue of ephemera"

etel adnan the arab apocalypse: "xxxvi"

stanley moss god breaketh not all men's hearts alike: "a blind fisherman"

robert browning an epistle containing the strange medical experience of karshish, the arab physician

tom sleigh beirut tank

khaled mattawa ismailia eclipse: "date palm trinity"

mark levine unemployment (3)

lucia cherciu butter, olive oil, flour

reginald shepherd fata morgana: "you, therefore"

john updike claremont hotel, southwest harbour, maine

bruce smith the other lover: "february sky"

johnny cash forever words: the unknown poems: "don't make a movie about me"

eamon grennan what light there is & other poems: "jewel box"

eduardo c. corral in colorado my father scoured and stacked dishes

thomas mccarthy the beginning of colour

divya victor curb: "blood / soil"

henneh kyereh kwaku in praise

joanna fuhrman to a new era: "lavender"

rosemary catacalos sight unseen

sam willetts digging

megan fernandes winter

jaswinder bolina the plague on tv

juan felipe herrera notes on the assemblage: "almost livin' almost dyin'"

kofi

[garadinervi]

Matti Kujasalo, Galerie Denise René, Paris, September 20 – November 3, 2018 (catalogue pdf here) [Art Books & Ephemera. Art: © Matti Kujasalo]

Artwork: Matti Kujasalo, Blue-Brown, (acrylic on canvas), 2017 [Galerie Denise René, Paris. © Matti Kujasalo]

[mehreenkhan]

Coffee is the sound of taste, a sound for the aroma. It is a meditation and a plunge into memories and the soul.

(from Mahmoud Darwish's Memory for Forgetfulness)

Coffee should not be drunk in a hurry. It is the sister of time, and should be sipped slowly, slowly.

(from Mahmoud Darwish's Memory for Forgetfulness)

I only believe in the easy things,

like red lipstick and coffee before noon and writing essays in pen.

(from Kristina Haynes, Self-Portrait at Twenty-One)

They can aim sea, sky, and earth at me, but they cannot root the aroma of coffee out of me.

(from Mahmoud Darwish's Memory for Forgetfulness)

I think we all speak a different kind of language than each other,

but you sound a whole lot like coffee on a Sunday morning and the rain is falling bitter against the windowpane.

(from Shinji Moon's He Loves the Rain)

You give me an apartment full of morning smells-

toasted bagel and black coffee and the freckled lilies in the vase on the windowsill.

(from Rebecca Lindenberg's Catalogue of Ephemera)

Making Coffee

Excerpts taken from trivarnahariharan_poetry on Instagram

[libraryofva]

Recent Acquisition - Ephemera Collection

Circulars, bills and catalogues, Such mail will never do ! Wise up, my dear and take a tip - I am the MALE for you - BE MINE

Valentine, 1941 Bickle Family Photograph Collection

[brilokuloj]

Join me and take action in the Battle for Libraries

As you may know, I am a passionate lover of the Internet Archive. Through 2020, I ran a section on my ephemera blog where I talked about hits from the Wayback Machine; I am a contributor myself, to the extent that my free time allows; even a lot of the music I play on streams is from there.

Yesterday, the worst happened: the future of 4 million digital books on the Internet Archive is now at stake, as well as libraries everywhere in the USA. I learned that the methods being targeted in this lawsuit (CDL, Controlled Digital Lending) are not just unique to the Internet Archive, but apply to the way even libraries like the fucking Boston Public Library, one of the largest libraries in the United States. This is a threat to public libraries and accessibility. The alternative we are expected to follow is book bans.

How can I help?

Donate if you have the money, obviously. But I know that's hard.

Sign the petition and sign up for email updates at Battle for Libraries. Not just a change.org petition but an established group that is working on organizing rallies.

They have some freebie graphics you can put on your posts (above). I don't see the harm in it.

Subscribe to the Empowering Libraries newsletter.

Support your local library. Even just going there when you can counts, they need the numbers! Check out books, look at their equipment if they have a makerspace.

Now's a good time to make personal backups of things that you could not live without. There's no real hope of an Internet Archive Archive (more on why it's more difficult than you think), but decentralized backups are always a good thing.

Don't just take it for me. DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH!

How to argue with "But piracy..."

First off, don't argue with trolls. But if you have an acquaintance who really doesn't get it, here's some resources.

Bandcamp's stance on piracy: "It’s not like they’d slap their forehead and open their wallet. Instead, they’d just move on to some other site where those restrictions aren’t in place."

"But if they steal it – how can I make money?"

Small Publisher Embraces Controlled Digital Lending to Connect with New Readers: "I think in the end, it drives sales because you are finding readers you wouldn’t normally have. Those readers aren’t getting a copy that they keep forever — it’s a copy that’s going to lead them to want to own it."

In the hopefully-near future I will be publishing a list of online library catalogues; coincidentally, I was reading a decade-old book about digital libraries, so I've got a ton of links for you guys.

[transmutationisms]

How do you find the time to read all your book recs?? Also would you mind talking about your process for researching specific topics :)

i generally only make rec lists for things i have enough familiarity with to navigate the literature so, you have to keep in mind those lists are sometimes literally a decade+ of cumulative reading on my end. i do also sometimes include texts i haven't read in their entirety, or occasionally even ones i've only come across in footnotes but still think are foundational or relevant enough to warrant a rec.

as to my research process: there's no single answer here because the sort of research i do will depend on what questions i'm trying to answer. usually if i'm starting to look at a topic completely from scratch, i'll ask someone who publishes in that area what the major recent works are, then scan a few of them. i might 'snowball' those texts (read the works they cite in their footnotes) but, that strategy has limited utility because it only goes backward in time and sometimes a recent or uncited text can be incredibly valuable. so there's a fair amount of bumbling around in the secondary literature at this point. some academic journals maintain bibliographies for their subfields, which are not comprehensive but can be useful; i usually also do a certain amount of keyword fuckery in my library's database. sometimes i waste a lot of time at this point chasing leads that turn out to be irrelevant, or i discover that a question i was chasing is really better tackled from an entirely different direction. shit happens.

at some point i usually reach a stage where i need to look at some primary sources, because i'm oriented enough in the major issues to identify spots where previous researchers haven't made full use of historical records, or may be interpreting them in a way i disagree with. so, what exactly i'm looking for now really varies. sometimes i just want to read the primary texts that another historian is commenting on: for example, the last few months i was trawling through the french national library's archives to see what people were saying in print about a specific historical figure between about 1778 and 1862. other times i might want population data or land records: births, deaths, cholera infections, records of church property sales, &c. depending on, again, what sorts of questions you're asking, anything might have useful information to you: postmortem personal auction catalogues have given me some mileage, along with wills and personal correspondance. i have a committee member who collects and analyses postcards often being sold for pennies at flea markets out of people's grandparents' attics, and another who has an ongoing project looking at a zillion editions of a specific children's book printed in the late 19th century. along the way, as i look at primary sources, i will typically go back and forth to more secondary literature, as i find new topics that might be relevant or help me contextualise what i'm looking at. i can't ever really plan these things out systematically; i just follow what looks promising and interesting and see where it leads me.

another thing to consider is that the primary sources sometimes tell me useful information directly in their capacity as material objects. what type of paper is used, what personal or library stamps appear on the cover, who's the publisher, how many editions did it go through, are the print and typeset jobs sloppy, where was this copy found or preserved? these sorts of details tell me about how people reacted to the text, its author, and the ideas within, which can be a valuable part of whatever investigation i'm trying to conduct. sometimes i end up chasing down information on a publisher or the owner whose personal library a book or piece of ephemera came out of; there are people who research processes of preservation, printing, &c in themselves, which has yielded some fascinating studies in recent decades.

at some point, if it's a research project i'm trying to communicate to other people, i will switch to writing mode, where i try to organise ^^ all of that in my head, and form a coherent narrative or argument that i think is worth making. this might be revisionist in nature ('people have argued before that such and such was x way or historical actors thought about it like y, but what i have here indicates we should actually understand it in the context of z') or it might be more like, "hey, i found this thing i don't think anyone knows about!" or anything else. again, the way you put together a research project will vary so widely depending on what you're researching, and why, and why you think it matters and to whom.

also, i should emphasise that what i've written here isn't necessarily something that happens on a strict or compressed timeline. i'm working on a dissertation, so for that topic, i do have reasons i want to complete parts at certain times, unfortunately. but i also have research projects that i just chip away at for fun, that i've had on various backburners for literally years, that i might sometimes write about (eg, on here) without necessarily ever planning to subject them to the hegemon of academic publishing. i think knowledge dissemination is great and to that end i love to talk to people about what i'm researching and hear about their stuff as well. but, i also think research projects can be fun / rewarding / &c when they're completely for your own purposes, untimed, unpublished, &c &c. i guess i'm just saying, publishing and research conventions and rules sometimes have purposes (like "make it possible to publish this as a book in the next 5 years") but don't get so hung up on those rules that they prevent you from just researching something for any number of other reasons. there are so many ways to skin a cat 📝

[sixties-heaven]

Schöpflin Haagen Catalog Autumn / Winter 1971 / 1972 PDF E-Book (with watermark)

Catalogue: Schoepflin Haagen Autumn / Winter 1971 / 1972 Pages: 418 Published: 1971 Language: German Size: 723 MB Format: PDF E-Book (digital product)

You will receive high quality PDF scans with a watermark from my Etsy shop.

This is perfect for collectors.

Interesting for finding ideas for the production of vintage items.

Also interesting for fashion designers and tailors and for theater & film to see what things were used in the 1970s.

A wonderful piece of ephemera and an excellent resource for designers and collectors of all kinds.

Instant download.

[mywifeleftme]

365: Patti Smith // Horses

Horses Patti Smith 1975, Arista

There’s a man named Nicky Drumbolis who lives up in Thunder Bay, Ontario, in an apartment that doubles as perhaps Canada’s greatest bookstore almost no one has ever seen. The septuagenarian Drumbolis is short and nearly deaf, a master printmaker and eccentric autodidact linguist. For years he ran a second-hand shop on Toronto’s Queen St. called Letters, until push (the size of his collection) came to shove (skyrocketing rent) and he went north, where he could afford a sufficiently large space to spread out. Unfortunately, Thunder Bay has little market for antiquarian books and micro press ephemera, and his shop is located on one of the most crime-ridden streets in the country. And so, the transplanted Letters has no storefront—in fact, the building looks derelict, its windows boarded up and covered with what at first glance seems to be graffiti but on closer inspection resembles a detail from the cave paintings at Lascaux. Letters’ patronage is limited to the online traffic in rare first editions that brings him a small income, and the occasional by-appointment adventurer willing to make the long, long 1,400 km drive from Toronto or further abroad.

When you enter, you find yourself in what appears to be a well-kept single room used bookstore, the kind there used to be dozens of in every major city. Books of every type and topic line the shelves, neatly arranged by category, and a long glass display features more delicate items, nineteenth century broadside newspapers and the like, some so fragile they seem on the verge of crumbling into dust. But this is not, Drumbolis warns you as soon as you attempt to take a book off of the shelf, a bookstore: this room is a facsimile, a tribute exhibit to as he calls it, “the fetish object formerly known as The Book.” The real bookstore lies in the chambers beyond this front room, the full catalogues of bygone presses, the one-of-one personal editions he’s assembled over decades of following his personal obsessions, the stacks which crowd his own modest sleeping quarters.

To Drumbolis, the original utility of the book as a container and mediator of information is now effectively passed; virtually every popular book in existence has been digitized, their contents instantly available in formats that are better-indexed, more easily parsed, and more readily transferrable than the humble physical book ever allowed. To desire a book is to desire possession of the thing rather than its contents, this edition, this printing, perhaps this particular copy that once passed through the hands of someone significant. He can show you the copy of John Stuart Mills’ On Liberty that was owned by Canada’s founding father John A. MacDonald, and argue convincingly that this object helped set the course of a nation’s history; or a set of Shakespeare’s complete works bearing Charles Dickens’ ex libris, which sets off a long anecdote about how Dickens liked to troll his houseguests with a collection of fake bookshelves. Drumbolis’s collection is threaded through his life like an old wizard in a fantasy novel whose flesh has fused with the roots of a tree: he eats with his books and he sleeps with them; collecting fuels his arcane research and dictates where and when he travels; 25 years ago he uprooted his life when his collection bade him, and though he’s starved for company in the frozen city it chose for him, he abides.

My own case of collectivitis is not so advanced, though Lord only knows what I’ll be like when I’m Old (I’m currently 47). And despite the conceit of this blog, I’ve seldom spent much time in these reviews dwelling on the physical properties of my records, evaluating the relative merit of pressings and the like (or even mentioning which one I’ve got). But as I sit here listening to my copy of Patti Smith’s Horses for the first time, I feel a small but definite sense of wonderment. It’s an early ‘80s Canadian pressing, so near-mint I might’ve stepped back in time and bought it new, still with what I take to be the original inner-sleeve, pale azure (to match the Arista disc label) with a texture almost like crepe paper.

It’s a delightful, surprising contrast to the iconic black and white cover portrait of Smith by her former paramour Robert Mapplethorpe. Generations of fans have stared at this image as they listened, not simply because Smith is hot (though this is undeniably true) but because the music’s visionary qualities demand an embodied locus. That a record, unlike a book, can speak aloud, has always primitively fascinated me; that this one contains what I can only describe as rituals makes it magical, this physical copy that is unique because it’s this one that is speaking to me in this moment. 

 Smith writes on the back of the sleeve:

“…it’s me my shape burnt in the sky its me the memoire of me racing through the eye of the mer thru the eye of the sea thru the arm of the needle merging and jacking new filaments new risks etched forever in a cold system of wax…horses groping for a sign for a breath…”

“charms, sweet angels,” she concludes. “you have made me no longer afraid of death.” The record becomes an extension of Smith’s body as it existed in that time—I think here of the physicality of the moment in “Break it Up” where you can faintly hear her striking her own chest with the flat of her palm to make her voice quaver. It makes me wonder how anyone could sell this thing once they have it: not because it is particularly rare or difficult to acquire, but because it’s hard for me to imagine the experience of slipping the lustrous black disc from its dressing and setting the needle down upon it as anything but a personal one. It is poetry and waves; the subliming of the idea of a rave-up; Tom Verlaine shedding his earthly mantle in an explosion of birds; John Cale; Kaye, Král, Daugherty, and Sohl; one of my boys from Blue Öyster Cult; the pounding of hooves and the Mashed Potato.

I suppose what I’m describing is a fetish, my pleasure in acquiring these things and writing these reviews the hard and strange work of finding life’s joy in its dusty corners. This year has run through my fingers like water, as it seems they all do now. But on my good days, all these words behind me and the records in front of me seem like a document of abundance.

365/365

[scrappopmania]

Catalogue: 3 Suisses Winter 1965 - 1966 Pages: 212 Published: 1965 Language: French Size: 156 MB Format: PDF E-Book (digital product) You will receive high quality PDF scans with a watermark from my Etsy shop. This is perfect for collectors. Interesting for finding ideas for the production of vintage items. Also interesting for fashion designers and tailors and for theater & film to see what things were used in the 1960s. A wonderful piece of ephemera and an excellent resource for designers and collectors of all kinds. Instant download.

[dawcats]

DAW flyer April 1992

[copcomco]

The Nancy Show in on!

This book's full title, The Nancy Show: Celebrating the Art of Ernie Bushmiller – A Catalogue Accompanying the Exhibition at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum – pretty much sums it up.  For those of you who don't expect to be able to visit the exhibition in person, this horizontally formatted, 12" x 9", 152 page, flexicover volume does a great job of presenting it to you in the comfort of your reading chair.  It features 72 big pages of high resolution scans of the original Bushmiller art along with 36 pages of full color reproductions of Nancy Sunday pages, plus plenty of pics of Nancy memorabilia and ephemera, an essay by exhibition curator Brian Walker amd more – including a Special Bonus Gift: inserted in the rear of the book is a fold-out sheet of Nancy gift-wrapping paper, composed of a collage of dozens of classic Nancy panels, suitable for wrapping the book itself or anything else one might give to a Nancy lover, yes – BUT, you're more likely to want to frame it and hang it on the wall!  So, with all that on offer – and for a quite reasonable price, we might add even those who managed to make it to the exhibit in person are likely to want to take a copy home with them.

Now in stock at Copacetic and available HERE.

[cheekedupwhiteboy]

are there any blogs like @dni-archive that just catalogue tumblr bio ephemera but do not also occasionally (in earnest) throw in the dumbest callout post you've ever seen. it's a great idea for a blog but that one in particular so fucking annoying to follow