Transient Print

Lisa Peters and Elaine Jackson

Introduction

As the celebrated ephemerist Maurice Rickards commented: ‘[I]‌f you take mankind’s five centuries or so of printed record, and divide it down the middle, you find half of it on library shelves and half of it in the waste basket.’¹ In this quotation, Rickards summed up how much print culture exists in a transient form and how easy it is to lose such material, through the waste basket and other means. Indeed, as David Osbaldestin points out in the opening chapter, the printing of ephemera has an older history in Europe than book printing, further supported by Susan May in her chapter on one form of early ephemera, fifteenth-century papal indulgences. As James Raven noted, printed ephemera ‘contributed to significant social, economic and political transformation’, in particular that ‘a markedly different perspective in understanding the social penetration of print’ can be discovered by examining ephemera as well as the more traditional forms of print: books and newspapers.² In recent decades, the importance of ephemera to printing, social, political and local history has increasingly been recognized through the work of noted ephemerists and the establishment of such organizations as the Ephemera Society in 1975³ and the Centre for Ephemera Studies at the University of Reading.⁴ All kinds of ephemera can be found in record offices, university archives and other collections throughout the UK and the world, sometimes collected deliberately such as Sir Walter Scott’s collection of chapbooks, discussed by Anette Hagan, or the Jobbing Printing Collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum as highlighted by Deborah Sutherland and Ruth Hibbard, whilst for others their survival has been a matter of chance. This has always been the problem with printed ephemera and is aptly described in the subtitle of David Osbaldestin’s chapter – ‘a throwaway history of ephemera studies’ – namely, that it is a study of material which had a short life-span: intended to be read and then thrown away.

This volume, with its contributions from art and design historians, museum curators, librarians and literary historians, demonstrates the wide variety of scholars and researchers engaged in the study of transient print and ephemera and the various ways in which its study can contribute to our knowledge of the past. The chapters of this book emanate from two conferences organized by Print Networks – one in 2018 at Gladstone’s Library in Hawarden on Printing for Business and a second held at Liverpool John Moores University in 2019 on Dregs, Dross and Debris: The Art of Transient Print. After the introductory chapter on the nature of ephemera and a brief history of how the study of ephemera has evolved in recent decades through the work of noted ephemerists, the remaining chapters are organized chronologically to allow the reader to see how ephemera and what constitutes ephemera has evolved over time.

Demonstrating the longevity of printed ephemera, Susan May discusses how King Henry VII of England used the new technology of the printing press to arrange for papal indulgences and other spiritual privileges to be advertised, marketed and distributed to anyone who could afford to pay for them. May suggests that Henry used this form of ephemera deliberately to curry favour with the people and encourage them to support the newly enthroned Tudor regime.

Scotland enjoyed a thriving print culture and chapters by Iain Beavan and Anette Hagan examine the nature of Scottish chapbooks. Chapbooks were a form of street literature, popular in early modern Europe, produced in booklet form. Two important aspects of chapbooks are discussed, namely the woodcuts used to provide crude illustrations and how this form of ephemera has survived to the present day and can be found in libraries and archives. The collector arranging for the binding of their chapbook collection thereby places it in a more durable form to aid its survival, but Beavan points out that whilst chapbooks are considered to be valuable ephemera, the woodcuts within them are disparaged and considered to be of poorer quality, old, tired and overused. Hagan uses Sir Walter Scott’s collection of over 3,000 chapbooks to analyse what the collection can tell us about the printing and distribution of chapbooks in both Scotland and northern England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although regrettably, Sir Walter never noted from where he got his chapbooks, Hagen discusses potential distribution networks and the role of the wandering chapmen. In addition, Hagan explains that Sir Walter did not acquire chapbooks solely for the purpose of collecting or for their antiquarian and book history interests, but also that he made use of their contents for his own literary productions, making the chapbooks a source material as well as an example of transient print.

David Atkinson discusses the purpose and use of bellman’s and lamplighter’s sheets which the local bellman and, from the middle of the eighteenth century, the lamplighter would present to householders each Christmas season in the hope of receiving a small gratuity in exchange. Therefore, these sheets were ephemera designed for the Christmas season and no longer. The earliest of these sheets date back to 1666 and were still being handed out in Norwich in the early twentieth century. Atkinson examines how these sheets were distributed and their content, illustrated by woodcuts, ranging from a commentary on political events to the hardships of being a lamplighter, delivered in verse.

Diana Patterson examines how Parliamentary ephemera – bills, Parliamentary committees, business of the House of Commons or the House of Lords and other political business – came to be used as decorated wastepaper in book bindings. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw a shortage of paper which led to Parliamentary ephemera being recycled into bindings. As Patterson explains, this Parliamentary ephemera went out of date very quickly and became a source of wastepaper within a few days of printing. Using her own collection, Patterson has identified some of the Parliamentary wastepaper found in bindings and categorizes them as mainly emanating from the period between 1780 and 1820 which was well-known for short-lived ministries and frequent political change, hence the printed material of this period having a short life-span.

Francesca Tancini reviews the Victorian pursuit for indestructible picturebooks for children. As she points out, young children often rip books, colour and write on them, and otherwise damage them. This, together with their relative cheapness and the fact that some children’s books are designed to be coloured in or interacted with in different ways has led to children’s books being less likely to survive than other forms of printed matter. The Victorian era saw the development of children’s picturebooks which were designed to be indestructible, arguably making them less ephemeral due to their durability. Tancini documents the history of these indestructible books – who published them and why, and the advances in book production which allowed publishers to claim that these books were indestructible.

Anthony Quinn tells the history of The Million – a short-lived colour magazine founded in 1892 whose failure cast a pall over colour printing in magazines. The Million was the brainchild of George Newnes, the well-known creator of Tit-Bits and The Strand, and Quinn explains how Newnes’s deft ability to give the magazine reading public what they wanted deserted him with The Million. Although a small number of magazines had used colour printing before The Million, Newnes’s magazine was the first published in large numbers (the print run for the first issue was 500,000 copies). However, its unique selling point was its downfall as technical difficulties associated with colour printing plagued the magazine, furthered by an unfortunate run-in with the Inland Revenue.

Deborah Sutherland and Ruth Hibbard highlight examples of ephemera from the Baynard Press and the Kynoch Press which can be found in the National Art Library’s Jobbing Printing Collection. The inter-war years saw the creation of ephemera such as posters, brochures and flyers designed to be visually eye-catching and persuade consumers to purchase the latest products. The two case studies of the Baynard Press and the Kynoch Press discuss each company’s ethos and approach to design, the services offered and provide examples of the printing each company carried out for such high-profile clients as the Royal Mail and the BBC.

Elaine Jackson discusses the ephemera associated with the once popular, best-selling romance novelist Berta Ruck. Her notebooks, diaries, scrapbooks, letters and business correspondence date from 1903 to 1973 and demonstrate her disciplined approach to writing. The chapter also catalogues the changing mores for women during this period, shows an increasingly competitive publishing environment and explains how Ruck engaged with her readers. Through her transient texts, Ruck provides valuable information on the practice of writing for women’s magazines throughout much of the twentieth century.

The various forms of ephemera discussed in the ten chapters demonstrate the wide breadth of transient print culture. Whilst there have been many studies of chapbooks and newspapers, less scholarly attention has been paid to manuscript forms of ephemera, bellman’s sheets and ephemera being re-used in book bindings. It is hoped that this book will encourage others interested in the study of ephemera and transient print to engage with its many forms, not only as a study in themselves, but also to demonstrate how the study of such material can engage with printing, social, political and local history.

1 Ephemera Society, <http://www.ephemera-society.org.uk/about.html>, accessed 1 November 2021.