Neither a Collector Nor a Saver Be

In the course of selling books over the last eight years, I have had the good fortune to handle the letters and manuscripts of many authors. One of my favorites is a short note from J.B. Priestley, responding to a fan letter: “I am a writer and not a film star, and so have no signed photographs to give you or anybody else…As for the advice you ask for, I suggest that you should constantly practice writing, just as you would have to practice playing the violin if you wished to be a violinist.” I like the commonsense nature of the advice and the slightly peeved tone conveyed in just a few words. Technically the letter is for sale, but I’ve never catalogued it, exhibited it at a fair, or even priced it. Priestley, while rather out of favor with contemporary book collectors, wrote some fine novels, and I like the letter too much to let it go in a depressed market. It is carefully preserved in an acetate sleeve and an acid-free backing board and is stored with other as yet uncatalogued inventory.

On the occasions that I have prepared an author’s papers for acquisition by an institution, I have always marveled at how cavalierly very valuable letters and even manuscripts are kept: filed with yellowing newspaper clippings, employed as coasters with tell-tale coffee cup rings, and even used for grocery lists. Letters and manuscripts are, to most writers, the stuff of their trade. They exchange work with other writers for comments and encouragement. People who write for a living also tend to write a lot of letters-the writing just pours from them, the practice to which Priestley referred-and they often write to other writers. These relationships, these “associations” in book collecting terms, are perfectly natural to authors, and they generally think no more of them than you or I think about the letters that fill our mailbox.

In publishing OP magazine, I’ve exchanged letters with quite a few good writers, some of whom are collectible now and others who may turn out to be in the future. My partner and I believe that we should offer only the best prose about books. After all, booklovers love good writing.

Even though I know better as a bookseller and collector, I can’t seem to think about letters I have received in the course of publishing OP in collecting terms. They’re just pieces of the magazine puzzle. Perhaps the most egregious example of my own cavalier attitude is the essay Larry McMurtry sent us for the July/August issue, a short piece about why he no longer autographs books. Mr. McMurtry (we’re still on formal terms, not having met in person) and I wrote back and forth several times about possible topics for the essay. I sent computer-generated letters, and he always wrote back in long hand. The essay itself, “Why I Stopped Signing My Books,” is typed with handwritten corrections on every page. The book collector in me has taken stock of these details and their implications. The magazine editor, however, has not.

I realized that I had completely compartmentalized the two parts of my existence when I saw the McMurtry manuscript (yes, a four-page typescript, with handwritten corrections and a holograph letter, all in an envelope hand-addressed by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who happens to be the finest Western writer of his generation) lying on the floor underneath a sleeping cat. I am not by nature very organized and while preparing OP for publication, I keep in-progress articles on my desk. When I have finished with them, I email electronic copies to my partner, Dee Stewart, for copyediting and layout. At that point, my working hardcopy goes on the floor next to my desk. When the issue is finally done, my desk is empty, and all the detritus of the magazine is in the pile on the floor. Eventually, I bundle it all up and put everything into storage. I suppose I should have shooed the cat away, gathered up the manuscript, placed it in an acid-free file folder, and put it into the special boxes I keep for these sorts of things. But I didn’t. Manuscripts go on the floor when I’m done with them, and the cat is free to sleep on them. Pulitzer or no Pulitzer, I couldn’t bring myself to give Mr. McMurtry special treatment.

For a time I wondered about this behavior, this carelessness that I scold authors for. I realized that moving Mr. McMurtry into “collected” status and the rarified realm of archival storage would change my relationship with him. Anyone, for a price, can have a Larry McMurtry typescript or an autograph letter. By putting his manuscript on the floor, by letting the cat nap on the pages, I can think of Mr. McMurtry as a colleague, a fellow traveler in the difficult world of publishing. Now where is that McMurtry envelope? I have a shopping list to make.

Scott Brown publishes OP – the magazine for used, out-of-print, and antiquarian booksellers and collectors. In addition to Larry McMurtry, Nicholas Basbanes, Dana Gioia (American Book Award winner and NEA Chair), Paul Collins (author of Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books), Roy Parvin (Best American Short Stories), Amy Stewart (Barnes & Noble Discover author), and Billy Collins (U.S. Poet Laureate) have graced OP’s pages.

For more information, visit http://www.opmagazine.com

#ephemera

Ephemeral Assays-Paper Rooseveltiana

We spoke in the last column of the gravitational pull of collectors, and of a fitting home for the inevitable disposition of thematic treasure troves. One such hunter-gatherer, Lyall Squair of Syracuse, NY, collected in excess of 300,000 Teddy Roosevelt items over the course of four decades. It would take a separate essay to chronicle his motives and methods, but the upshot is that the Squair Collection was purchased by the New York State Library in 1998 for $200,000. Mr. Squair could have realized many times this amount by breaking the collection up or selling outright to a rival, but thanks to a firm sense of historical propriety (and years of patient coaxing from the Manuscripts and Special Collections Unit of the Library), it came instead to the heart of this great institution. I had a chance to survey these boxes before processing, and a quick sampling indicated that well over two-thirds of the material is what we define as ephemera.

A good portion of this ephemera is virtually worthless. A print ad showing Teddy Roosevelt selling bottles of ketchup, torn out of a 1970s magazine, is only of value in terms of demonstrating the enduring popularity of this figure (President Chester Arthur, for example, could not return from the grave to hawk some modern day product). A hundred years from now such material, which seems so common to us, may be of more interest. A handsome black and white Swedish poster from the turn of the century shows TR pitching Tiedemanns cigarettes. This has monetary and historical value right now, because the former asthmatic would never have advocated such an unhealthful practice, and because the poster is contemporary to his presidency and in very good condition. In our first column we described ephemera as “the heete of one daye,” that which is not meant to last longer than the temporary purpose for which it was created. Survivor ephemera renders any collection ten times larger, more interesting, and more unique than it would be otherwise.

The timing of this acquisition was fortuitous in another sense as well. We are undergoing a great resurgence in the appreciation of Teddy Roosevelt. A sickly lad, TR rose like a granite mountain to overcome every obstacle in his path. Though wildly popular in his day, there was a time not too long ago when the bluster and militarism of the man led to unfavorable revisionism. After decades of partisanship and scandal we now yearn for a president who combines robust decisiveness with incorruptible reformism (I do anyway, and this is a bully pulpit to say so). Not that he was perfect by any means, but read one of the many modern biographies on this scion of New York and you will be surprised and delighted on many fronts. One of Squair’s finds,The Most Interesting American (1915), carries an inscription from one W.F.C., “a Teddy man,” which reads, “John Hay once said in the Century Editorial Office, ‘If you don’t want to like Roosevelt, you’ve got to keep away from him.’”

Lyall Squair produced a catalog of his TR acquisitions, housed in a black three-ring binder with the title, “The Theodore Roosevelt Library, 1961-1995” above a silhouette of his famous hero. It is arranged by category, and subdivided further by author, subject, or date. The largest category consists of “BOOKS ABOUT TR.” Although our main concern is ephemera, these books cross over due to their service to the larger collection, their inscriptions, etc. Let’s plunge right in with some curious titles, such as The Teddysey (1907), Monkeys and Monkeyettes: A Reply to Ex-President Roosevelt (1909), the privately printed Who is Bashti Beki? (1912), and The Extraordinary Adventures of Theodorus Gunpowder (1915). Did TR: Hero to His Valet (1927) serve its author well? Here’s the seventy-two page play Bully in book form (1979), with an intro by TR IV, in which James Whitmore portrays the ex-president on stage (John Davidson was doing the same thing in 1998). The Rev. S. P. B. D. Bland penned the eleven page President Roosevelt and Paine’s Defamers (Boston: Boston Investigator Co., 1903). From this unfriendly-sounding title we learn that Squair has mixed booklets in with books. Journal articles too, for the very next entry is “Ambassadors at the Court of Theodore Roosevelt” in an author-inscribed reprint from the Mississippi Valley Historical Review (9/1955, Volume 42, No. 2). I find one I’d like to read, Camping with President Roosevelt(1907) by John Burroughs. Titles requiring further research such as the fifteen page Roosevelt‘s Dakota Ranches appear with notations like, “no place-no date-no publisher.” The Roosevelt That I Know: Ten Years of Boxing with the President pops up in an autographed, limited edition. Can’t imagine boxing with Roosevelt. Who Was Who 5000 B.C. to Date (1914) seems like a stretch. One edition of A Cartoon History of Roosevelt’s Career (1910) comes with forty-three lantern slides. Many of the book titles contain fragments such as, “strenuous life,” “stalwart companions,” “greatest living man,” “man of action,” “happy warrior,” “great heart,” and the apt “paradox of progressivism.”

And paradox he was. TR the ornithologist could record the hues of breast feathers one day and coolly blast a charging cape buffalo in the brain pan the next. His earliest work in the following section, “BOOKS BY TR,” is a four page folded sheet privately published at the age of nineteen and simply titled, The Summer Birds of the Adirondacks in Franklin County, NY. Squair has a first edition and three distinct reprints, as well as the original proof manuscript! (Little did TR know he would be whisked off this same mountain range to assume the presidency after McKinley’s assassination.) Here’s another rare and serendipitous item. R. W. G. Vail was a former director of the New York State Library, and a famous antiquarian book collector in his own right. Squair found several limited editions about TR which Vail was involved with, including a four page item titled, President Roosevelt’s List of Birds Seen in the White House Grounds and About Washington During His Administration. As a local auctioneer is fond of saying, “Where ya gonna find one?”

On a more common note, if you can call numbered, limited, signed and inscribed editions common, there are several such copies of The Wilderness Hunter: An Account of the Big Game of the United States and Its Chase with Horse, Hound, and Rifle (1893), as well as a 1906 edition in Swedish. All the gorgeous, two-fisted first edition Scribner’s, Putnam’s, and Houghton Mifflin titles are here in multiple, such as Through the Brazilian Wilderness (1914 et al), but how many collectors have bagged “Mammals Collected on the Roosevelt Brazilian Expedition” as it appeared on pages 559-610 in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History (8/9/1916, Volume 35)? We find several editions of Rooseveltian Fact and Fable(1908 et al) by Annie Riley Hale, but only one of her slim supplement to this work, Bull Moose Trails (1912). The Winning of the West (1889 et al) requires two pages in the catalog, and includes a four volume Daniel Boone edition, limited to 200 copies, into which a sheet of the author’s original manuscript has been inserted! Not too shabby. The Rough Riders (orAlone In Cuba as one contemporary needled) was his most popular work, propelling its author onto the political stage. One 1899 first edition was inscribed by a surviving Troop H Rough Rider in 1964, and it rubs spines with a Signet Classic paperback edition from 1961 as well as a Classics Illustrated comic book of the same vintage. (The State Library happens to own the original typescript of this work, complete with TR’s handwritten annotations, donated as part of the great Gotshall Collection half a century ago.) We find many different editions and printings of the same title (e.g., at least seven variants of Hermann Hagedorn’s The Boy’s Life of Theodore Roosevelt). Of TR’s collected works, we find the Dakota, Elkhorn, Executive, Homeward Bound, Prairie, Sagamore, Statesman, Memorial, and National editions-some duplicated-running between fourteen and twenty-eight volumes, followed by the parenthetical notation, “Have many single volumes from other sets.” This is all-important evidence in the movement to have Mr. Squair’s wife considered for eventual sainthood. Rounding out this section on works by TR are wonderful collections of published letters to his children, diaries in book and serial magazine form, memorial books, and such flotsam as salesman’s samples, advance copies, publisher’s broadsides, etc.

“BOOKS ABOUT THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR” includes eight pages of sabre-rattling titles. “THE ROOSEVELT BEARS” chronicles the children’s book adventures of Teddy B and Teddy G in a beautifully illustrated series penned by Seymour Eaton and published by Edward Stern & Co. in the early 1900s. There’s a section on books by TR owned by family members, followed by another on books written by or about seventeen different Roosevelt family members, not to mention Fala the dog. These include reminiscences, historical works, poetry, novels, outdoor adventure, etc. One cookbook simply contains a recipe for spice cake submitted by Edith Kermit Roosevelt. Squair collected blue, red and green cloth copies of this item. Many of these works contain family bookplates, or have calling cards laid in, and many are signed editions. One is inscribed to Squair himself by Alice Roosevelt Longworth. The Ideals of TR, with a forward by his sister Corinne, carries her 1923 inscription to one Albert Shelby Le Vino. “Le Vino was a big T.R. collector” follows this catalog entry. Most charming of all is the nondescript Sea and Shore, bound in cover-worn red cloth. You wonder why it washed up on these sands and will open it to hear, “Christmas/74, To Corinne from her brother Thee Jr.,” penned when he was only sixteen.

“SPEECHES, REPORTS, PROCLAMATIONS, AND EXECUTIVE ORDERS” is fertile ground for those collectors with a more political bent. Lyall Squair has two copies of the earliest example, a twenty-three page report TR made to the U.S. Civil Service Commission entitled Upon a Visit to Certain Indian Reservations and Indian Schools in South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas(Philadelphia: Indian Rights Association, 1893). You can trace his streaking political career from a Naval War College address in 1897, through his proclamation for slain President McKinley and his first message to both houses of Congress in 1901, and on through many pages of speechifying right up to the last here, a July 1918 appearance before the Republican State Convention meeting in Saratoga, NY. Many of the public addresses in this section are personal use copies (some signed), and include photographs, menus, floor plans, and seating lists. Some are surely scarce, such as an address to “negro and Indian students” at a Hampton Institute Decoration Day event, some are in shorthand, and one is even printed in Dutch from a speech delivered in Amsterdam. There are a dozen or so official documents signed by TR as governor of NY or president of the U.S.

Scandal does not rear its ugly head much in this catalog, either by dearth or design. TR was involved in a natural history dispute regarding “revealing and concealing coloration in birds and mammals,” in which some experts disagreed with his writings on the subject. Not too revealing or concealing compared to modern standards. There is a lengthy, privately printed 1914 bound transcript of testimony taken in Marquette, Michigan, Roosevelt vs. Newett, in which the latter is sued for publishing a libel which claimed TR was an alcoholic. A 1913 letter from his attorney, laid into this transcript, offers to reimburse the expenses of those witnesses who testified on TR’s behalf.

Rounding out the paper ephemera, we have additional lantern slides, stereoscopic slides, including fifteen of the Rough Riders, over sixty examples of sheet music, many bound, loose and mounted newspapers and clippings, and hundreds of post cards. Of this last group, many picture historical sites and events, some are boxed sets from his post-presidency African trip, but no connection is too tenuous. Any ship or hotel named after TR was fair game, and even an Ulaula fish post card (scientific name: Rooseveltia Brighami) felt the yank of Squair’s hook.

There are several interesting manuscript collections represented. The wartime papers of John D. Miley, an aide-de-camp to Major General William R. Shafter, the Commanding U.S. General in Cuba, contains some fascinating items, such as correspondence from the front, a list of authorized press artists and correspondents and the warmongering newspapers they represented, as well as his Rough Rider discharge paper “signed twice by Col. TR.” Correspondent Frederick E. Sturdevant followed the ex-president on his world travels, and saved many interesting paper items. Conservationists Clarence L. Parker and Charles Christopher Adams are responsible for seventeen boxes of preserved materials as well. This includes the history, early records, and publications of the Roosevelt Wild Life Forest Experiment Station at the NY State College of Forestry in Syracuse.

Next follows a fourteen page list of autographic material, going back to a business transaction record of payments by John and Jacob Roosevelt dated 1771! Many are important and/or official, but this body of letters and documents covers such sundry subjects as maple syrup, a subpoena, and the gift of a sewing table. There is also a nice group of political correspondence to and from Eugene Philbin in this autographic section, in addition to smaller groups.

A cornerstone of the Squair Collection was his acquisition of glass plate negatives from the files of the photographic firm Underwood and Underwood. We see TR at his desk, in a buckskin hunting outfit, at the head of his Rough Riders in Montauk Point, taking the oath of office for president, enjoying the rustic hospitalities of Pocatello, Idaho, speaking to cowboys from a decorated platform at the Alamo, planting a tree, watching golf and polo, hunting in Colorado, traveling in Cairo, and visiting his son Quentin’s WW I grave in France. One early negative is simply titled, “TR Speaking in the Sun.” If a picture is worth a thousand words, you can feel the warm sun on his live cheek again in an instant with an image like this in a way words would be hard pressed to convey.

This collection of fabulous glass plate negatives serves as a translucent stepping stone of sorts from books and paper to actual TR-related 3-D objects and artifacts of every description imaginable. It’s the dividing line where the NY State Library hands off to the NY State Museum, and where Dewey Decimal numbers give way to collection accession numbers. The National Portrait Gallery, with the aid of several historical institutions, organized an exhibit (TR: Icon of the American Century), which began touring in 1999. The printed catalog which accompanied this exhibition is a lavishly published guide to the various collections lent. In contrast, Mr. Squair’s typed list is simple, and its contents mirror the drive of the completist collector as opposed to that of the calculating curator with critical colleagues and limited exhibition space. Samples from both were on view when the national exhibition came to the State Museum, and I was able to observe the Museum staff selecting representative items for this pairing.

Going through the list of Squair TR artifacts in categorical order, with some examples, in one long roller coaster sentence, we find BANKS (“shoots coin into tree, bear pops out top, reproduction”); BOTTLES (imported tequila, after shave lotion, syrup, salad dressing); CALENDARS (various advertising calendars with TR quotes and photos 1899-1999); CAMPAIGN BUTTONS (trays full, and the cream of the crop in my opinion); CIGAR BOXES AND BANDS (five cent cigars with “TR head and shoulders in gold wreath on cover”); CLOCKS (“TR mounted on prancing horse”); COMMEMORATIVE PLATES (a 10″ McKinley/TR tin plate from 1899, a 1903 NYS Fair blue and white Wedgewood with a quote from his speech there); GAMES (TR and the Lions); JIG SAW PUZZLES (by Saalfield, Whitman, Milton Bradley, some never opened); KERCHIEFS (“TR and Fairbanks–1904–Protection to American Industries,” red, white and blue, 24″ high x 22″ wide); PATRIOTIC AND POLITICAL CHINA (mugs, mustache cups, sugar bowl); PLAQUES (bronze, hammered copper, profiles and quotes); PORTRAITS (a 1919 oil, prints, lithos, gravures); SCULPTURE (a large bronze bust by James Earl Frasier as well as lesser bronzes, a 1910 plaster African scene featuring “A smiling TR in hunting costume with a lion one each side of him,” a ceramic Lefton, a frosted glass bust); THE ROOSEVELT BEARS (all kinds of items bearing these famous bruins); TEDDY BEARS (a large amount, from the real thing and early teddy bear-related items to lots of plastic and plush kitsch such as Koosh Critters-he went way overboard here); TEACHING AIDS (most featuring all the presidents); and TRAYS (“blue ceramic scalloped portrait tile,” other early metallic trays). Under MISCELLANEOUS we find book ends, cake decorations, a nifty campaign siren, Canal Zone matches, candy molds, coasters, dishes and dish towels, Carry a Big Stick incense sticks, milk cartons, napkins, notebooks with TR on the cover, paper cups, paperweights, pencil sharpeners, place-mats, playing cards, a ring with “black stone set in gold with TR in raised relief with a light blueish colored stone,” silk thread, spoons, straight razors, tickets, U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt stuff (caps, pins and the like), period Teddy’s Teeth (“metal 3 ½” wide x 1 ¾” high red lips and white teeth”), a wooden armchair with woven seat (he sent this from Oyster Bay to his sister’s home in upstate NY because he liked to sit in it when he visited her), wrapping paper, wallpaper, and a woven tapestry (“Cotton 58″ x 55″. TR in a wreath in the center. Shields, eagles, scenes of the west-cowboys, cattle, hats, pistols, and dogs. Color brown, cream, red.”). At least it wasn’t on black velvet like Elvis.

Comparing the two collections, it’s clear that Lyall Squair excelled in his acquisition of books and printed ephemera-particularly with some of the rare and unusual items. As for the artifacts, many of the best examples were owned by Sagamore Hill or snapped up by the Smithsonian and other institutions long ago through donation or purchase. With the exception of a relatively few important and valuable pieces, many of Squair’s artifacts are more whimsical than valuable. (Their average age, for example, would date later than the average age of the paper items.) Squair might have secured the last four full bottles of TR Great American Buffalo Wing Sauce on this planet, but they only tell us what we already know about the man’s lasting popularity. Enough, then! I will let him rest in peace for awhile. As Cary Grant said to Eva Marie Saint under Mount Rushmore on Reel 6, Page 21 of the script for North by Northwest, “I don’t like the way Teddy Roosevelt is looking at me.” By: Shawn Purcell mail@balopticon.com

#ephemera

Ephemeral Assays – the Paper Trail

If I had five seconds to ask two questions about life, they would be “From whence?” and “Where to?” Same with paper ephemera. Where on earth do you get it, and what in heaven’s name do you do with it once you’ve got it? Paper is great for collectors because they know what they want and how much they will pay for it, and most antique dealers and booksellers can handle the occasional good piece that comes their way, but full-time pursuit and dealing is pretty specialized. It requires a lot of hunting, winnowing, processing, and marketing.

The word is out about paper, especially at auctions, and it’s getting harder to make the big scores that can sustain this career choice. On the plus side, house call purchase prices are still fairly low, the gene pool is deep, you attain a highly efficient degree of retail display verticality (a bucket of nicely packaged paper totaling hundreds of dollars takes up the same shop or show space as a musty $19.00 deco hamper), and you’re in a niche market with universal appeal.

Ask an ephemera dealer how s/he got started. In my case, I used to buy dollar box lots at the tail end of auctions, including those loaded with the paper detritus of an individual’s life. Much of this is dreck, such as banking records, but there’s usually a good amount of family history in there which future genealogists would surely like to see saved. A lot of the older ephemera from the first half of the last century has little monetary value, but these items were created in interesting ways for interesting purposes. They come down to us from an innocent, unhomogenized era, and have defied the odds of survival in doing so. I couldn’t bring myself to discard these things, which led to storage problems, so I packaged the saleable pieces and box lotted out the non-garbage remainders at other auctions in the hope that someone else would spare them from the dumpster. I bumped along in this slightly bemused and barely profitable mode until I had a $5.00 auction purchase epiphany which appeared in the form of two thirty gallon garbage bags filled with the early paper of a future bank president. I was able to trace his life without any voice-over narrative. As a young man around 1928 he made modest investments in mid-western oil wells and western mines that went bust as soon as the Great Depression hit. These certificates and high-pressure missives were nicely decorated with oil rigs and mining equipment, and probably made more for me than they did for countless investors. After that debacle, our young man contacted hundreds of firms that marketed get-rich-quick schemes with a fervor that foreshadowed his future predominance in the world of high finance. There were full color pamphlets and catalogs (the lion king of ephemera) for advertising stilts, store punch-cards, fountain pens, soda fountains, novelty items like nudie knives, radios, popcorn machines on portable advertising stands, thermometers, and just about anything you could think of, all in perfect condition and in their original envelopes. I stayed up all night absorbing them till the robins told me to call it quits.

The better examples sold to specialist collectors at book and antique shows for several years at an average of about $40.00 per piece. One telescope catalog collector up from New Jersey begged to come home and look through whatever I hadn’t brought with me, and repeat customers would run way back to my full booth as soon as the doors were flung open at future shows. What I couldn’t have known then is that the days of such auction finds were numbered, and that I would have earned ten times more for this stuff by selling it online years later.

Thus bitten, the next step is to see what ephemera reference books there are, attend paper shows and auctions, join an organization like the Ephemera Society of America, and perhaps learn at the feet of a master. Thus schooled, it’s time to journey into the wilderness alone to test your mettle and perfect your techniques.

Hunting ephemera at general auctions is a very hit-or-miss affair. Many auction halls don’t bother with it at all. Others don’t understand it, and if auctioneers misstated the nature or importance of pottery or furniture in the same manner they’d be hooted off the platform. The only thing funnier than a worthless beer flat of religious hymn books or Currier & Ives calendars or Etude music magazines failing to get a single bid is when somebody pays far too much for them. I know many antique dealers and even booksellers who have been burned by paper so often that they’ve learned to avoid it assiduously. For those auctions that don’t have an aversion to or ignorance of paper, you often find box lots arranged by category. One can usually tell if these lots are first time to market or if they’ve been picked over already. For example, if you scope out a groaning table of Life magazines with no Marilyn, Ali, Beatles, or other standout covers present, you’re not in Kansas anymore. If the auction print ad uses the words “paper” or “ephemera,” bring extra cash. Serious, well-advertised items such as a batch of good Civil War letters seldom go under the money these days.

The secret to success when it comes to general auction paper lies in the preview process. Arrive early, or, if possible, the day before. (True ephemera auctions require a whole day, though you often have the aid of a printed catalog.) If you can’t preview adequately, sit as close to the front as possible. There have been times when I arrived very late and just outbid everyone else on the boxes of ephemera which caused the most excitement, but this is risky business as you may be bidding against the uninformed or against the determined collector who doesn’t have to worry about resale value. On one occasion innumerable boxes of alphabetized files from the career of an ancient social studies teacher came up. It took a long time to preview them and others gave up, but five or so were quite valuable, being chock full of ephemera on Native Americans, canal monographs, etc. I must mention verticality again. When you buy a big box of postcards or a van full of books and paper, you’re getting a lot of stuff for the money. And all kinds of great things can be hiding in there. When you buy a rocking chair in need of repair, there are no mysteries. You’ll spend hours fixing it up, and it may or may not sell for a small profit in your lifetime. If it’s a Hummel figurine called “Sensitive Hunter” or something, you know within twenty bucks what you’ll get for it someday. You know who your three Hummel competitors in the area are, you have to worry about authenticity and hidden repairs and breakage, and you have to have this around your house until you sell it. Give me the virgin forests, hidden ravines, deep fishing holes and swarming exotic game of ephemera any day!

In addition to the Power of the Preview, another admonition is Let the Buyer Beware. All the chicanery of auction houses and the antiques field is refracted by the multiplicity of surface planes and undulating folds inherent in rag and wood pulp products. It pays to know what’s going on around you. Several years ago I was acrobatically extended over a tall narrow box of Boys’ Life looking for Norman Rockwell covers. Ten mags from the bottom I found a huckle of early Stanley tool catalogs that I eventually sold for hundreds. Hours later they got to this part of the heap. The auctioneer was trying to signal his pal up front to pay attention, but the guy was chatting away and didn’t notice that his hidden cache was about to be knocked down. The fix was becoming obvious, so the auctioneer had to let it go for a few dollars.

When the burrower realized he’d missed out a moment later, he looked around to see who the naive buyer of a bunch of boy scout magazines might be, in order to make a lowball offer on the tool catalogs. It’s also a good idea to check the lot you’re interested in periodically, to make sure that expensive trade card or whatever didn’t somehow leap from one box to another or even right into a pocket. I heard about a guy in Boston who bid thousands on a loose lot of stamps for one very valuable specimen that disappeared between the preview and the bidding, and the auction house did not give him a refund.

Other more standard auction advice also applies to the pursuit of paper. Calculate ahead of time what you can reasonably expect to make on an item, and don’t let auction fever sway your estimates. Try to pick up some things that you can turn over quickly. Learn what’s hot and what’s not. Listen in on free appraisals during the preview. Avoid entangling alliances because there are usually too many variables. Get to know the runners. Go over and ask them to put stuff up when your bitter rival starts heading for the bathroom (just kidding, sort of). Roll with the punches. I’ve paid $700.00 for a box of faraway local historical photos and papers I fully expected would sell for one tenth that price, and I’ve paid one dollar for a huge amount of 1920s architectural greenhouse drawings I would have spent $500.00 on. Look for unexpected opportunities, stay frosty (as in alert), and make mental notes for future reference.

If we don’t learn from the mistakes of buying history, we are doomed to repeat them.

Where else do you find good paper? Yard and estate sales provide the occasional score. Some outfits that run estate sales are willing to unload all the books and paper for one money days before the cutthroat event even begins. Estate lawyers can help along these lines too.

Targeted newspaper advertisements sometimes get your foot in the door without the competition breathing down your neck. Dumps are clamping down on bin diving, though I was reading the other day about a growing company that cleans out garages and attics. Many of their franchise holders take advantage of the free spoils policy, and the article included a photo of a guy in overalls (if I recall) holding up a valuable comic book that went quite high on eBay. I work on a commission basis with a good plumber friend, and my brother’s best informant is a Roto-Rooter man. There’s probably even some valuable ephemera laying around your own house which may or may not have enough sentimental value to keep it there.

When you reach the tyrannosaurus level, like a certain colleague of mine (we’ll call him “T”), you no longer have the time, space, or inclination to deal in lower-end ephemera. T displays at a book and paper show almost every weekend, following the circuit. He prefers those where he can set up the night before, allowing time to shop around. T has a great customer base, and he knows his merchandise, so he can simply walk the aisles before the regular crowds arrive, buying low and selling high. He can double his money on a $500.00 broadside with just one long distance phone call. He has the confidence to buy an old bicycle poster all in pieces for hundreds, have it professionally restored, and sell it shortly thereafter for thousands. T also buys entire estates full of paper and books. When I first met him he said he’d just bought a house one state away for $85,000.00, which I thought was pretty cheap for that county, but he meant just the paper in it! He finds things I can only dream about, like a captain’s trunk full of 1850s clipper ship cards and related NY to San Francisco transportation ephemera. A few years ago he purchased a barn-full of boxes that came from a rural New Hampshire lawyer’s office. The lot was sold for the first time in the 1970s, and it changed hands a couple of times before he picked it up for $5,000.00. Obviously, the standout items had been skimmed, but even some of those he was able to buy back separately after the sale because the previous owner didn’t know how to market them. Most of the boxes had not even been opened, however, so he was faced with the monumental task of wading through them one at a time. The amount and variety of ornate nineteenth century letterheads and billheads alone was staggering. There were thousands of old deeds (which will hopefully find their way back to New Hampshire some day). And there were loads of hidden treasures. T opened a boring, nondescript ledger book late one night and ended up with a lapful of early, unusually indecent cabinet cards. These are of the type most highly sought after by serious erotica collectors. “Were they French?,” I asked. “The poodle was, anyway,” came his reply.

One can picture the proper small town Victorian lawyer squirreling these away in such a hiding place. After years of handling boxes in alternately broiling and freezing self-storage units, T bought another house near his own in which to sort and store all this stuff. Separate rooms are reserved for different types of subject matter. Someone asked him how his new house was looking and he said, “Frankly, I don’t have very high hopes for it.” T is tired of auctions with a capital “T.” Besides the trickery and all those wasted hours waiting for the books and paper to come up, he often finds himself competing with his friends and customers or being asked to enter into cooperative arrangements with them. He particularly doesn’t like those auction houses that allow consignors to bid their own items up, which most do by the way. T says he makes ninety percent of his mistakes at auctions. He does use them to unload mass quantities of less than stellar stuff, however, and I haunt these whenever possible like a sucking remora follows a shark.

To bring us regular ephemera fanciers down to earth for a moment, there is one final paper trail, and that is serendipitous discovery. True ephemerons hide well. Awhile back I purchased a box lot of books, one of which was that ubiquitous A through B free first volume of a supermarket encyclopedia offer. I think it was called The Encyclopedia of Collectibles.

Flipping through the pages very quickly, a crisp yellow and red Big League Chewing Gum card from the 1930s worth $30.00 fell out from the baseball entry under the Bs. I bid on a dreaded old regular encyclopedia set at auction not long ago because I noticed the tiny tip of a silver certificate poking out, and that one volume alone was some departed soul’s hiding place for ten or so more. My favorite, though, is another little coincidence that got me interested in ephemera early on. I was sitting high up in the corner window of a major research library plowing through some books for hours on end, and time was running out. I’d left one large tome that appeared as if it hadn’t been cracked open in twenty years for last because it didn’t look helpful. Turns out it contained just what I was seeking. At the very end of this research session a curious piece of paper fell out and spiraled down in the waning golden twilight. It turned out to be a learned mini-essay on, and tribute to, ephemera, published in the 1970s by some eccentric down south. It is multi-colored and quite beautiful.

He likened ephemera to his other passion, which was fireworks. He told of the print run, some five hundred and fifty or so if I recall, and of the vault where a certain number were archived. I doubt if they’re still in that vault. How many have survived? Less than a third, I’ll wager, and half of those accidentally alive like the one I found. Maybe fifteen will still be with us in excellent condition by the year 2100. I believe in the severest punishment for taking anything from libraries, but surely this was different. It didn’t belong in that book or in that building. Some hurried researcher left it there years ago by accident. Any staff person finding this on the floor would have thrown it out. Though not really worth any money, this is my favorite piece of ephemera. I’d like to reprint it in full, but, like all good ephemera, I re-lost it some years ago. I know I’ll find this printed May Fly again when I get down to the right archaeological level in the Mesozoic carbon heap that is my office, and it will be reprinted some day as a farewell column in this series like the finale at an ephemeral fireworks display.

#ephemera