Property of Nicole Belolan: Ephemeral Material Culture of One Day in 2014

Some time in 1935, Virginia Brussard (possibly the Altha "Ginny" Virginia Compher mentioned here)

bought a blank scrapbook.

She assembled, affixed, and labeled paper and other ephemera from what appears to have been her last year of high school in northern Maryland. She saved everything from candy wrappers and cigarettes...

...to dance cards and bows.

In 2013, I bought Virginia's scrapbook at one if my favorite paper shows: the Paper Americana Show in Elkton, MD.

I have nothing that compares to Virginia's scrapbook. At various times during my life, I did make a few scrapbooks of my own. I discarded most of them in one of many fits of unburdening myself of unnecessary stuff. Just think how many more scrapbooks we might have today if people like me had never, as some people put it, decluttered. Or, consider how many fewer scrapbooks we will have from our times since so many people are "going paperless." Yes, the paper scrapbooking industry--while still strong--is in decline, as some are reporting.

Like many scrapbooks, Virginia's includes lots of stuff we would consider ephemeral. In other words, when most people finished eating their Planters Peanuts in 1935, they discarded the wrapper.

Let's face it. There aren't many of us out there saving our receipts, food containers, or our bookmarks, either casually or methodically (like Virginia). As Tyler and I walked around the Paper Americana Show this past January, we mused about how much longer we'd have piles of early twentieth-century snapshots to wade through at paper shows. Today, many stores email receipts, and most of us squirrel away our photographs in "the cloud." Someone better be saving this stuff so future collectors have something to buy at the Paper show that isn't on an external hard drive, we decided. I started to wonder what a day's worth of my discardable paper might mean to a paper show patron in 2064.

So in the space of about twenty-four hours, I did not throw away (or recycle) my paper and other ephemeral waste--a sort of experimental archaeology exercise that gave me a chance to think about my habits as they related to the stuff we casually toss away today.

At the end of the day, I piled up everything from candy cigarette boxes to Colonial Williamsburg Foundation membership offers...

 

...from interlibrary loan slips to credit card junk mail.

I learned more about myself and the world and then I thought I would. One of the things I noticed was my near automatic impulse to throw away my parking garage receipt and other pieces of the day immediately upon removing the coat in which I had temporarily stashed them for the short ride home. I also noticed that when it came to "junk mail," I didn't even bother opening most of it. I also didn't bother to expunge my name from the various marketing mailing lists on which my name appears. (So I will be receiving these things in perpetuity.) The only reason I opened the Colonial Williamsburg offer is because I wanted to photograph (for the blog) the Foundation membership card I knew they included inside the mailing based on nearly identical promotional material I had already received. (Don't get me wrong - I do love Colonial Williamsburg). I also decided (and this isn't all that revolutionary) that we just generate more paper than seems to be necessary. The book I interlibrary loaned (using an electronic form) generated at least one and half pieces of full-sized paper. When will this "paperwork" be completely digital (let alone--gasp--the book itself)? And once I sat down to a meal, it occurred to me that my little experiment excluded food packaging (save the candy container) and toiletry packaging entirely. But I can tell you that I use shampoo, split end repair and four facial cleansers and creams on a regular basis...all of which I purchase along with disposable containers. I considered my body routine to be relatively low-maintenance until I started tabulating the damages. Finally, after I snipped a piece of red ribbon from the bouquet Tyler got me, I thought about all the stuff around me (health records, miscellaneous school papers, birthday cards...) that will, within a matter of a few months or perhaps a few years, be discarded. Do I live among trash?

I will live among more soon. I cooked up the scheme that I will save my paper ephemera one day every year until I no longer have any junk mail or ILL slips to save. I hope my students will appreciate the opportunity to think about change over time as it applies to my paper.*

When I sell my "ephemeral Property of Nicole Belolan" collection or show it to my students, some will giggle at how quaint those physical credit cards were back in the old days. They may even pause for a moment in disbelief as they try to figure out if the eighteenth-century looking newsprint, which you can buy readily at Colonial Williamsburg, is really from "early" America. (I won't speculate here when will we be teaching "later" America or twenty-first century America. Perhaps we already are.)

Just like I will continue to wonder why Virginia saved cigarettes boys (suitors?) gave her, perhaps in 2064 someone will puzzle over why the same person who interlibrary loaned historical monographs about early American disease also consumed candy cigarettes. 

* Interestingly, I converted to Apple's iCal about two years ago and just this January went back to my paper system. Somehow I feel more in control of my time when I mark it with paper.

Further Reading

I've been meaning to write this post for a while now, but I was newly inspired to put fingertips to keyboard by my dissertation adviser's current grad seminar about disposability (sadly, I am no longer in coursework!) and this TeachArchives.org exercise titled "Digging for Garbage in the Archive."

For more on the history of hobbies and do-it-yourself culture, see “Introduction: Context and Theory,” in Steven M. Gelber, Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America (1999): 1-20. I don't necessarily agree with the suggestion that hobbies are a postindustrial phenomenon, but this is a landmark book, nevertheless. 

If you want to read more about scrapbooking and the history of similar paper crafts, see Beverly Gordon, The Meaning of the Saturated World and “The Paper Doll House,” in The Saturated World: Aesthetic Meaning, Intimate Objects, Women’s Lives, 1890-1940 (2006): 1-35 and 37-61, Susan Tucker, Katherine Ott, and Patricia P. Buckler, Eds., The Scrapbook in American Life (1997), and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, “Introduction (1): Mrs. Delaney from Source to Subject,” Mark Laird, “Introduction (2): Mrs. Delaney & Encompassing the Circle: the Essays Introduced,” and Amanda Vickery, “The Theory and Practice of Female Accomplishment,” in Mrs. Delaney and Her Circle, edited by Mark Laird & Alicia Weisberg-Roberts (2009): 1-39; 94-109.

And finally, if you want to read more about ephemeral material culture, check out Maurice Rickards and Michael Twyman, Encyclopedia of Ephemera (2000), William Davis King, Collections of Nothing (2009), Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (2000), and Joseph Heathcott, "Reading the Accidental Archive: Architecture, Ephemera, and Landscape as Evidence of an Urban Public Culture," Winterthur Portfolio 41, 3 (Winter 2007): 239-268.

A Feast for the Eyes: Paper and Photographic Ephemera Roundup

As I glanced through the mail a few Saturdays ago after taking in the antiques show in Elkton with Tyler, I squealed with glee when I noticed a letter from the Singerly Fire Company. This could mean only one thing: I won the paper show door prize. Again.

We had joked with friends about my chances of winning the door prize for a second time, but I had never expected that it might actually happen. I don't plan on sharing the booty, but I will take a few moments to share some recent paper and photographic acquisitions with you.

First, there's the item I bought at the January paper show: a 1930s scrapbook a teenager in high school put together. I tweeted a teaser photo a few weeks ago, and I hope to blog about it soon when I have more time to take a closer look at it. (For starters, she liked to save cigarettes.)

I can't emphasize enough how much I enjoy collecting paper ephemera and photographs. For one, these objects are accessible to most people (including kids--start 'em young!) in terms of cost. Saturday, for example, I bought several photos for just $2/each at the Elkton Antique Show (same location as the paper show). Second, this stuff is portable and is great to collect for teaching purposes. When I want to bring a real mid-ninteenth-century religious tract into class to show students what tract society peddlers carted around to promote developing a more personal relationship with God, I can. I have two stored safely in acid-free plastic sleeves.

What else have I acquired recently? For starters, I am a sucker for unusual or hard-to-find photographs of interiors or exteriors that document everyday and ordinary domestic life. We know how the elites lived. Their stuff is published,  collected, and interpreted with verve. We know less about how ordinary folk lived. Take, for instance my friend Mr. Grier Youngman here (he name is on the underside). At first glance, I registered a regular guy reading, sitting in a common Victorian balloon-back chair. As I looked a few seconds more, I noticed all the "props" in this photo that give us some hints into his everyday life. He rode a bike, which is peaking out from behind the chair and the packed rotating bookshelf. On the wall, you see two decorative pieces of art and what is most likely the bottom of an American flag. 

What's his story? Perhaps this gentleman boarded in a room alone, and perhaps he made a living in a profession that required a small library. Or he was a voracious reader. In either scenario, he probably featured his books (and his reading) prominently in this photograph because he saw his books as part of his identity. After doing some genealogical digging in Ancestry Library Edition, I discovered that Grier was from Danville, PA, and that he was born around 1871. He married in 1894, and I would suspect that he had this photo taken when he was still a bachelor bank cashier (or teller). The way Grier staged this photograph suggests that he had some professional ambitions as a young man. And so it is not surprising that, by the time 1930 rolled around, according to the census, Grier had become the President of the Danville National Bank. Grier had built what we might consider a solidly "middle class" lifestyle by the Depression. Did this photograph represent Grier's aspirations to attain that status? What made the interior we see here a "home" for him?

Exterior visions of domestic life can be equally thought-provoking. 

In this photo, we see (cut?) flowers sitting on a shelf at right, as well as some hanging flowers descending from the roofline. Presumably, early twentieth-century ordinary folk used plants and flowers for decorative purposes around their homes, but we rarely see that practice documented in photographs (let alone in manuscript evidence). And by chance, it looks like I might have found a photograph featuring an older man with a cast of his left hand (related to my interests in disability history). What do you think?

Also with the body in mind, take a look at this photo.

We don't think much of women drawing attention to their pregnancies in photographs today. Indeed, celebrities often pose nude when pregnant for magazine covers. Did you ever stop to think when it became customary to draw attention to one's pregnancy while posing for a photograph (or any portrait, for that matter)? It looks like that might be what is going on in this early twentieth-century image.

I am unaware of a tradition of "pregnancy" portraiture in early American visual culture. That said, I do know that a number of Elizabethan era portraits picturing women in the late stages of pregnancy survive. Scholars such as Karen Hearn and Pauline Croft have suggested that those 
portraits, an example of which you can see below, may have embodied, among other things, concerns over political machinations, producing successors to various hereditary titles, and the health dangers associated with bearing children as women aged.

Portrait of a woman, probably Catherine Carey, Lady Knollys, oil on panel, 1562 (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection). Published in Pauline Croft and Karen Hearn, "'Only matrimony maketh children to certain...' Two Elizabethan pregnancy portraits," The British Art Journal 3, 3 (Autumn 2002): 20.

What does the relative unpopularity of such portraiture in earl(ier) America suggest about our attitudes toward women and child-bearing, privacy, and corporal modesty? 

And finally, we have some jokesters.

I bought this online for Tyler for Christmas, thinking it was a whimsical tintype (as the dealer said it was).

I was somewhat skeptical since the men's hairstyles looked to be from the 1920s, but I knew that tintypes were (believe it or not) in use through the 1930s.

Sure enough, when I opened the package, I knew the minute I looked at the photograph in person that it was not, in fact, a tintype but a paper photograph that  looks a lot like a tintype when developed. I am not annoyed that I didn't receive a tintype. Rather, I am annoyed I have yet to figure out exactly how this photograph was produced. I think it may be an example of a photograph produced by a an early photobooth or photomaton that was used to capture images of people at fairs and carnivals. In the cop and robber photo, for instance, the fact that there appears to be a crowd in the background suggests that this was taken outdoors at a place (such as a fair or carnival) where there would have been a lot of people. If anyone out there is familiar with such images from the early twentieth century, I'd be interested to learn more about them. What can this practice reveal about how the conventions of humor and visual trickery have changed over time?

Once I had familiarized myself with "fair" photos, I didn't hesitate for an instant to snatch up this contemporaneous photo of a man posing behind a "fat suit" cutout.

French fries, anyone?


Further Reading

Historians, sociologists, and economists alike have struggled to enlightened us all with fascinating discussions in an effort to define the "middle class." If you're interested in joining the conversation, you might start with Burton J. Bledstein and and Robert J. Johnston, eds.,  The Middling Sorts: Explorations in the History of the American Middle Class (2001) and Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (1989). For a discussion of Victorian home interiors and middle class culture, nothing beats Katherine C. Grier's Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making in America, 1850-1930 (1989) and Culture & Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-class Identity, 1850-1930 (1997). Also see Kenneth L. Ames, Death in the Dining Room and Other Tales of Victorian Culture (1992).

On the history of Mr. Youngman's bicycle, see David V. Herlihy, The Bicycle (2004).

For more on Elizabethan pregnancy portraits, see Pauline Croft and Karen Hearn, "'Only matrimony maketh children to certain...' Two Elizabethan pregnancy portraits," The British Art Journal 3, 3 (Autumn 2002): 19-24.

Humor, visual trickery, and photographic manipulation boast long histories. You might be interested in the Met's recent exhibition on the history of photographic manipulation. On of the exhibition's sub themes was "novelties and amusements." In addition, Tromp l'oeil ("to fool the eye") visual culture in American isn't quite analogous to what we're seeing in the fair and carnival snapshots above, but I think it's related. If you're interested in reading more about visual trickery and the tradition of tromp l'oeil (to fool the eye) painting in America, see Wendy Bellion's Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (2011), exhibition highlights from the National Gallery of Art's exhibition Deceptions and Illusions: Five Centuries of Tromp L'oeil Painting, and the online catalogue for the Brandywine River Museum's exhibition on contemporary tromp l'oeil artists here.