Everyday Matters: Book Detritus As Ephemera

In the land of ephemera, book detritus (i.e. stuff left inside a book by the reader) must rank as nearly the lowest form that could be collected (stepped-on, mucked-up sidewalk litter ranking slightly lower, perhaps). Yet, the lowly can be the most revealing. While preparing books in the Schmulowitz Collection of Wit & Humor (SCOWAH) to be cataloged, I have made two discoveries: previously hidden collections reveal themselves in startling ways; and the detritus found inside books provides unexpected cultural information about their readers. Nat Schmulowitz, whose personal book collection and gifts of approximately 13,000 volumes form the core of SCOWAH, was a reader whose books--and the detritus within them--literally illustrates these discoveries. This post shares some choice bits of book detritus from SCOWAH.

The way in which I first began to notice and organize this material is as contextual as the detritus found inside the books. When I'm preparing books for cataloging, I like to get to know each book--I examine it, open it, fan the pages, and look for foreign objects that are not part of the original book. These foreign objects are the detritus: bits and pieces of paper and other flotsam and jetsam left by the reader. What to do with these bits and pieces? Not wanting to toss them, I started collecting and placing them in acid-free envelopes. Before saving an item, I identify the book in which it was found by writing the author, title, and publication date on the back in pencil (a few items went undocumented in the early days). Sometimes the detritus is fragile or of fabric not easily marked, so I place it in a smaller envelope and write the citation on that. Then all the bits, pieces, and fragments go into the big envelope, waiting for the occasion--such as this blog post--when they might be individually and collectively useful.

Of course, not all of the book detritus comes from Nat himself--some of it may come from the bookseller or previous owner from whom he acquired the book; moreover, SCOWAH contains many more volumes than the 13,000 donated by Nat Schmulowitz. The library acquires books through donation or purchase, so that today there are more than 21,000 volumes in thirty-five languages. Still, when we think about the detritus found in SCOWAH, we mainly think of Nat Schmulowitz and his lively collecting habits.

He was an avid collector of ephemera. As he traveled through Europe, Asia, and points beyond, he collected the remains of the day, and subsequently amassed about thirty scrapbooks. In preserving the detritus left inside his books--a random assortment of railway tickets, bookmarks, certificates of merit, postcards, prospectuses, handwritten lists, receipts, drawings, calling cards and business cards, holiday greetings and gift tags, newspaper clippings--we are privy to something curious and wonderful: the unconscious act of collecting, an art in itself. Viewed separately, these bits of everyday matter may seem to possess neither rhyme nor reason, but viewed together, they document a particular time in a happy collector's life. Whimsy rules. Assembled across a table, the articulation of a life of the mind is brought into focus, however random these fragments might be.

Everyday Matters is an occasional series of blog posts featuring ephemera in the collections of the Book Arts & Special Collections Center and the San Francisco History Center. In his Encyclopedia of Ephemera, an exhaustive work on the subject, scholar Maurice Rickards proposed a definition that has gained wide support, although it isn't perfect: ephemera is "minor transient documents of everyday life."

Information on the history and collecting of ephemera may be found in the library's online catalog (search by subject for "printed ephemera"). And take a look at these online ephemera resources:

The California Ephemera Project
The Centre for Ephemera Studies, University of Reading (UK)    
The Ephemera Society of America
The Ephemera Society (UK)

All images of ephemera collected from books in the Schmulowitz Collection of Wit & Humor, SFPL.

Where the ephemera was found:

Nat Schmulowitz's visitor's card, in A.P. Herbert. More Misleading Cases

(London, 1930).

Fred Bason postcard, in The Jest Book: The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings. 

Selected and Arranged by Mark Lemon (London, 1865).

Scottish Widows' Fund bookmark (designed by Walter Crane), in Selections from the Masquerade: A Collection of Enigmas, Logogriphs, Charades, Rebuses, Queries and Transpositions (London, 1826).

Flower sticker on screen. Undocumented.

Holiday gift tag, in J.B. Morton. 1933 and Still Going Wrong (London, 1932). 

"Greetings for Christmas," in Harriet S. Peters. "Rocky Mountainania," or, a Tenderfoot's Dictionary : Words Without Music (Denver, 1943, c1934).

"A Happy New Year" postcard, in Little Book of Bohemia, compiled and edited by Wallace and Frances Rice (Chicago, 1910).

London Transport ticket, in Wit of the World, or, Jests and Sayings of the Present Day (London, 1851).

Red Cross certificate, April 1, 1917. Undocumented.