Back in 1977, having until recently been running an art library and frankly missing it very much, I had an impassioned article on visual ephemera published in the Art Libraries Journal.Footnote ¹ It was in fact written a year earlier and had its genesis in reflections derived over my years working in that art library; mixing with and collection building alongside art and design academics, practitioners and would be practitioners, and fellow librarians. It caused no ripples that I was ever aware of and for me it paled into insignificance in comparison with the boyhood letter I had written and had published in the 1950s Eagle comic – that one was really “downhill all the way ever since”. Imagine then my surprise, dear reader, when – long retired and strolling as slowly and comfortably as possible towards oblivion – this long forgotten item hove up again through the seas of time and experience and the current editors of Art Libraries Journal asked me if I would be prepared to write a few reflections on the topic considered in retrospect. I thought about it and, somewhat startlingly, realized that much that I had been doing, experiencing and thinking in the intervening years was relevant to the topic.

In that earlier article I argued strongly, if not always coherently, for an inclusive view of cultural change which accepts that all visual artifacts are evidential data relevant to art history and practice and that as such art libraries had, and have, an overwhelming responsibility to include them in their collection building. I attempted to point out that technological changes in the means of production, specifically mass production and printing, did not invalidate their practice links with the past and that in considering and collecting and presenting them for use we professionals needed to be very careful that we were not overly swayed by narrow historic models of relevance, importance and quality – supported as they were (are?) by a mass of largely unexamined vested interests which were naturally resistant to a widening of definitions which would also ascribe some of these values to the new mass forms which we saw developing around us and which are still developing in digital forms. I discussed the nature and apparatus of “art legitimisation” and its then bearing on publishing patterns and book selection. I considered the casual and then often deliberately pejorative use of terms such as “current”, “ephemeral”, “folk/peasant”, “commercial” and “mass” as against “classical”, “canon”, “fine” and “unique” (in terms of personality and inspiration) in resisting recognition of their continuity with and relevant transformations of these supposedly unassailably more refined and even transcendent prior forms. I stated boldly that “Artists and craftsmen are the same, the differences in their media and processes may impose very varied approaches to quantification but the final aesthetic judgement – if such a doubtful and elusive thing exists – is composed of essentially the same elements for all designed artifacts, taking account of the degree of success in the transubstantiation through design, technique and synthesis of extant elements to produce apposite new relationships and symbols which durably embody the norms of human existence, essential aspects of their base culture and intensify, dramatise, illuminate, interpret or renounce them for members of this culture. They may even do so for a subsequent audience from the same or different cultures, retaining some essential impact over the passage of time and the diffraction between cultures” (1, pp. 7–8) but attempted a more nuanced consideration elsewhere to justify this judgement. I will come back to some of this.

Firstly though a bit of personal background simply because I think it illuminates why I took the stance I took then, what I did and thought in between and what I now have to say.

Much of my early childhood was spent in East Africa; my father working as a research parasitologist combating the malarial tstetse fly. In the days before the inevitable rise of the local independence movement we children in the community had a near pre-industrial, agrarian experience – roaming widely, conversing easily across “classes” in a rural world of restricted natural colours and sounds and spoken narratives. Text and image were rare outside of what seems in recall a desultory schooling. I occasionally received second hand copies of Eagle from my cousin John and was electrified by its innovatory colour printing and bold artwork. Apart from that “picture” was life and “story” was what our parents and locals told us and what we told each other. In these saturated days of created image and sound scapes it is hard to envisage that this was what was experienced by the bulk of human beings up until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and what an impact there then was on individuals and cultures when innovations in production allowed wide, mass access to images and texts. Slowly but spreading, pictures – black and white – showing us things we've seen and, more, things we have not…and words telling us about it. Some of us read them, many are read to…stories like we tell each other and like the parson tells us from the Bible…but different, interesting, new. Compare and contrast, more – consider. And then too, fixed bright colours like nothing we've seen around except for the transient specks of the limited colour range of native wild flowers. It is perhaps impossible to conceive for those who have perforce grown up immersed in our present colour-filled sea of entertainment, information and attempted influence.

When, in the face of extreme polarisation and rising danger, we returned to Britain in the mid 1950s I, equipped with this privileged experience but undoubtedly not then recognising it in any coherent way, was astounded and exhilarated by access to so much story and picture. Around us lay the detritus of Victorian and Edwardian endeavour, the churning of new technologies inventively developed and throwing out a mass of goods, particularly mass printed – and illustrated – material. Outside the rapidly expanding and increasingly monolithic dominance of commercial retailing was a now vanished network holding and recycling this discarded past. (Now happily re-animated via the car boot sale, e-Bay, Google Image and digital resources.) My father and I (he – naturally curious and studious – long starved of such resources and flinching away from a traumatic family catastrophe; I – a sponge newly hooked on learning other than through sometimes too powerful direct experience – indiscriminately and excitedly handling, assessing and mentally sorting) spent Saturdays and holidays trawling and collecting in second hand bookshops, junk shops and the vast regular jumble sales – some held in and actually filling fields. I joined the local public library and rapidly read my way through it. I marvelled at omni-present advertising. I went to school, now really listening and watching, and to the cinema, skipping hated games-Saturday afternoons. Granny bought a television and allowed us children to watch; the “late joys” of the retro City Varieties music hall in Leeds introduced me to a heady vision of a part of the past, the notion of reconstructing and understanding created sub – milieu and left me with an indelible familiarity with the songs and the routines and an inkling of their relationship to the new media expanding around me. It helped me think about all this “stuff.” This growing interest in the past, relativism and cultural process/product was re-enforced by Great Aunt Marion's kindly annual gift of hardly ever used Letts Schoolboy Diaries which I nonetheless devoured over and over for the fact and image full footnotes at the bottom of each page – Ctesiphon, Petra, explorers, inventions, the art world . . . . For a period a would-be encyclopaedist, I cut these out and pasted them into long gone scrapbooks but retained the habits of mind and organisation which had lead to their creation. Rosemary Sutcliff's remarkable historical novels appeared and I collected and read them all, further expanding my interests and views. The gift of 1960s pop music with its attendant questioning social movements and a blurring of art forms exploded around me. I fell across Marshall McLuhan. History Sixth and a joint History and Literature degree followed naturally into librarianship and happy years in an art college library.

The formative experiences I have described above together with reflections produced working in the art college brought me to the core realisations behind my first article. Namely that the past is what produces now and, in turn, the future and that those of us in the business of accumulating, arranging and redeploying material to be used by others studying and learning from the past or seeking to gain inspiration from it for future work must beware of imposing on our collecting commonly accepted models of relevance or quality derived from that past and/or narrow preference. For art and design the mere existence of something with a large element of designed visual content is enough to mean that it should be collected regardless of its avowed immediate purposes and that the cheapest and most truthful/least organized and interpreted moment is just after the point of production when it has become purposeless and unfashionable.

Latterly, retired from increasingly sterile time in senior academic library management, I had the joy of four part-time years spent sorting the complete and almost accidentally retained collection of planning applications for a nearby local authority – now happily digitised. The exquisite plans of the might-have-been-city of rejected applications! Alongside this, twenty years have been spent researching the fragments of the life, works and family background of a now largely forgotten artistic polymath and collector with a huge acquaintanceship amongst those in the Victorian and Edwardian arts worlds; undertaken at a time when the development of searchable online data was massively expanding the possibilities of exploration and linkage. Both of these unconsciously brought me back to thinking around the general concerns of my 1977 article which I had frankly pretty well forgotten adding, I think, a greater awareness of how very powerful the past is and what a spur and justification that is for ensuring that it can be accurately and comprehensively studied.

Returning to the “stuff”, where did it all come from? What came before it? Can we say anything useful about that relevant to an examination of visual ephemera, the value of their collection and study? Starting in fifteenth century Europe with significant influences from elsewhere and accelerating rapidly through the nineteenth century new mass production techniques made traditional, quasi-traditional and new forms of art ever more widely available and affordable. They naturally drew on established “high” art traditions, slimming them down and adapting them, since they made their products seem desirable, acceptable and readable and allowed their consumers to feel that they too shared the secret circle of elite privilege. Lachlan Goudie in his excellent recent television series on Scottish art neatly described the new generation of wealthy nineteenth century Glasgow entrepreneurs as discovering in collecting paintings and artworks “a new way of laundering their identity, to clean out the muck from under their nails.”Footnote ² Equally, these new and actually more demotic forms often also drew on the folk traditions and oral histories familiar to their new audiences. Designations shift – pre-eminent “classic” or “high” turns into “fashionable”, “celebrity”, “bestselling”, “radical” – new benchmarks are set, but the interest inherent in the processes of design, production/technology use and transmission remains constant. “Classic” calls on “street” and new forms and content result, focusing symbols and icons are newly created or are reborn. What is put in and what does it call on? What is left out and why? How will it be read and used? What does it consciously or unconsciously reveal about creators, producers and consumers and their society – hopes, fears and constraints? Asa Briggs percipiently observed that “as our sense of past time changes, we try to strip away the intervening layers and discover the immediate witnesses.”Footnote ³ In order to be able to do that we need the evidence.

Using my upbringing, timed as it coincidentally was between significant cultural and technological shifts, as a prism we have re-examined some overall aspects of the genesis and nature of visual ephemera, adding I hope to what I said in my previous article. But what, actually and distinctly, are they? Back then I deliberately avoided offering a definition up front, hoping instead to concentrate the reader on the wider argument and avoid the distracting wrangling towards clarity which inevitably comes with the effort of turning varied perceptions into an agreeable form of words. Just after its publication I was prevailed upon to use it as the basis for the chapter on “Printed ephemera” in The Art Library Manual: a guide to resources and practice Footnote ⁴ and here I used lists of items to obliquely define the topic – for example “Pamphlets, brochures, catalogues and sample books”; “Stationery and postal items” and “labels and wrappers” and so on – an approach I still find helpful. However, it was one I deliberately eschewed in my 1977 article again wishing to avoid the inevitable reduction ad absurdum of “You can't call a matchbox art. Where is the quality in that?” to concentrate instead on the background issues discussed above which were arising from the fascinating work of anthropologists, and cultural anthropologists in particular, now turning their gaze away from Imperialist-tainted topics and onto industrial culture. I must confess that this calculated avoidance was perhaps given some additional point by the stony response I had received to a comment I made a couple of years before to a small conference when, in attempting to disentangle the difference between cultural impact and cultural value – that slippery, ultimately personal beast – I had suggested that American comics, then in a deeply creative “Silver Age”, might well in the future have as much cultural impact and therefore historic importance as Shakespeare in providing stories and inspiration. Anyone been to the cinema lately, looked in a bookshop or a library or almost any retail outlet? Unsurprisingly, and naturally, it sounded more heretical then.

However, on reflection I now feel foolishly emboldened to add a personal definition of ephemera as they pertain to art libraries and archiving to the many already in existence:

“Cultural products, in whatever current format, which have a significant visual content and which were designed and generally produced for short term, often disposable, utilitarian purposes but which, when subsequently viewed singly or together, reveal evolving social and cultural concerns and the creative and technical processes in vogue at the time of their making and which have the potential for inspiring further artistic creation.”

As a corrective to this clotted wording I must add Maurice Rickards's “the minor transient documents of everyday life”Footnote ⁵, Frederic Casiot's “modest witnesses to daily life”Footnote ⁶ and Richard Stone's equally elegant “evidence of the culture of the everyday”Footnote ⁷; all of which remind us that these are items produced by and for people and which, where they have a material form, often bear traces of their previous human use. I would also add that I now believe that much if not all of “fine art” actually falls usefully within or not far from these definitions.

What else is there to say, what did I miss back then and what has changed?

Well, then I was really just writing about mass printed items with visual content having a tangible physical existence though I did make brief reference to the Annan Committee and broadcast television and radio output in the context of the difficulties and risks inherent in selecting or sampling materials. Since then pretty well all of those kinds of ephemeral items and a lot of newly created forms are digitally produced and many of them are only ever incorporeal – virtual, digitally created, held and consumed. This is perhaps the biggest and least widely foreseen change across these forty years and it clearly has farther to go.

Since then as well a considerable body of professional literature has grown up on the topic of ephemera which provides both advice on what to do and how to do it as well as information on the existence of the many ephemera collections which have been newly built up or which have been rearranged and re-catalogued, some times out of larger collections, so as to make them more accessible. I would, for instance, draw your attention to a fascinating 2006 “Ephemera: special issue” of the Art Libraries Journal Footnote ⁸ and to Rebecca Altermatt and Adrien Hilton's article on the large collection of ephemeral material previously hidden within the stock of the Tamiment Library at New York University.Footnote ⁹ I cannot match this corpus of useful information and am now almost certainly not aware of much of it but I think there are still a few aspects worth picking up for discussion especially since the transforming nature of digital technologies has re-enforced some of the issues and problems I highlighted, created others and perhaps offered some potential solutions though I'm afraid what I have to add will more often be pertinent questions than solutions.

Are ephemera still under represented? Viewing the art publishing scene in the mid 1970s I was quite scathing about the narrow, dominant range of “high art” monographs then being published and purchased. Since then, perhaps because the market for studies on, say, Picasso is naturally self limiting, a wide range of books on the mass, demotic visual arts are now widely and more speedily available, and provide an easy, affordable in to genre topics though, inescapably, they are selective and secondary in their offerings. In 1977 I argued that “even a small collection of actual/current ephemeral material will offer more accurate information for consideration and a greater number of examples than most books . . . . such a collection will allow for the formation of unbiased conclusions and, together with published works, may well point up didactic and inaccurate selectivity in the latter.” I think I was being somewhat unreasonable here. The point, the advantage, of monographs is to argue a viewpoint, an explanation or a link to which others can respond and as such they are vital. Nor is it easy to achieve that fabled unbiased purity in any ephemera collection where selection has been involved even though the number of examples held is likely to be greater than in any monograph. On top of this there is the indubitable evidence from the professional literature of the intervening years that there are now more new or re-profiled ephemera collections available, many broadly relevant to the study and practice of art and design.

Does selection matter? Is it inevitable? If so how best to do it? In 1977, trying to balance matters, I wrote “Plainly it is impossible to keep everything. The economic situation would not allow it and the possible conservation problems are immense . . . . Selection, especially if rooted in a rigid or outmoded model of culture, will tend to impose misleading patterns on a collection rather than leaving these to be derived by scholars whose opinions and archival needs are likely to change as new angles/ methods of examination come into being.” (I would now amend this to read “impossible to collect or keep everything.”) I still think the balancing point about the dangers of selection and sampling remains a valid and powerful argument for trying for comprehensiveness, however, I also think that that is somewhat simplistic; ignoring the advantages of selectivity and skating dangerously over the role of the art library in relation to its base institution and the political considerations that follow from this relationship. Ideally an ephemera collection will be as comprehensive as possible and that breadth will indeed help scholars and creators and allow a collection to offer new relevances as interests change. Certainly, sheer volume in a collection allows the detection and analysis of complex interrelationships not always apparent in smaller collections. However, selectivity itself offers interesting possibilities and is more realistic in the face of the very real difficulties and costs of acquisition, storage and facilitating access. When I was writing the Annan Report had just suggested that “all broadcasts from one day each week or month be preserved, thus retaining not only those items of currently approved cultural value but also a broad spectrum of other material which would allow more accurate appraisal.” Ephemera can be collected by intended purpose, type, name, date, time period, location/area, individual taste or even random selection – the Boyle family's immensely evocative methodology for selecting and making artworks comes to mind. I'm sure many of us can think of selective ephemera collections/clusters we have come across, whether privately or institutionally collected and held or deployed by practitioners (Schwitters, Hamilton, Paolozzi, outsider artists et al), and how powerful and interesting these were. However, art libraries sit within and serve institutions. The costs of collecting ephemera can be low or even negligible but there will inevitably be costs (time and money) involved in conserving, arranging and making them safely available. Nor is the gain always immediate or apparent, often the creation of such collections is a forward investment against future domestic interests and institutional reputation. Art libraries work in relation to curricula or avowed institutional functions and it is prudent to build collections in relation to these functions/aims, overtly recording agreement in collection development plans and action (which is of course cost) and investment (forward commitment by management and users) in service development plans. On the other hand, a number of really interesting collections were created when acquisition costs were low and cannily “chucked in a drawer” until their value was perceived and resources to sort and deploy them were forthcoming. I still believe the message is to do it rather than not and to recognise the unique reputation possessing such collections can confer on libraries and institutions. However, the problems of budgets, staffing capacity were pressing then and undoubtedly more difficult now.

How important is primary material? I still treasure the ability to see and, sometimes even handle, original material objects; valuing their unique textures and implicit human stories but I recognise that this may be a passing feature related to my age. Digital images are uniquely useful in making available otherwise difficult to handle valuable or cumbersome three dimensional objects and museums with their many hugely rare items are successfully opening up access beyond the still safely displayed originals by putting virtual versions up for study. Pay to view services have digitised huge tranches of previously difficult to access material, opening them up in new ways with powerful search engines, and much of this material already has visual content. Partnerships may be possible, indeed some ephemera collections are already digitised though the relevance of all of them is not always immediately apparent – remember the planning applications and their accompanying plans? Unique collections hugely relevant to the study of architecture and design. The web is full of digitised images put up by interested parties and new generation historians of the particular and Google images makes them freely available in new ways.

What are the preservation issues? For mass printed items these include paper hydrolysis, clay coatings, chemically aggressive inks, photographic disintegration, and damage by mold, photo-oxidation, air pollutants, and improper handling necessitating cleaning, de-acidification, paper repair, and above all funding for it. Back then plastic pockets were an apparently welcome and affordable new tool but the intervening growth in the range and equal affordability of conservation quality storage has been very welcome. For purely digital objects these include knotty issues such as shelf life in relation to format and the ability to maintain reliable storage and replay facilities.Footnote ¹⁰ Set against this there is the wider recognition of the marketability of nostalgia and the increasing likelihood of the continuing commercial availability of some key historic examples. I know that there have been a number significant and written up examples of the methods by which digital objects might be selected and retained for future study but I am no longer in a position to sensibly quote from or recommend them.

Can such collections in the UK be comprehensively mapped? What advantages would follow? Have they been mapped? If not are there obvious bodies who, together or singly, could lead such an effort? Do public and university libraries and museums hold collections worth inclusion in relation to art and design libraries and their clientele? Or are art and design concerns a relevant subset of a more useful overall survey? An interesting and not too onerous exercise might be to ask ARLIS members to list those articles of visual ephemera that they think are or should be pertinent to the study and use of art and design history and then to circulate an integrated list for further comment. This latter, perhaps, exposing the nitty gritty issues of relevance to mission, funding, space, awkward format and so on.

I end with three quotes, one repeated from myself containing a quote from John Johnson arguably the grandfather of British ephemera collections, and the last a deeply poignant distillation I heard recently.

“It should be a basic fact of art information existence that we collect key and representative items from any thriving area of artifact production within our base culture that has any art/design content so as to enable future art historians to reach for an accurate appreciation and to allow practising artists and designers to comprehend and use the complexity of recent traditions. Though the medium, form or the genre may be new, the very nature of the item, its existence as a flower of our cultural tradition, a modifier of our view of the past and an influence for the future, constitutes a reason for collection and an essential part of our raison d'etre as librarians. I can do no better than quote the view of John Johnson…‘that the waste, the ephemera of today, are the evidential data of tomorrow, should by now be a truism’Footnote ¹¹” (1)

When in 2002 Dan Cruickshank asked the caretaker of Hatra in Iraq what the place meant to him he replied “This is Iraqi heritage, the culture of our grandfathers and sons…it is our lives, our history.”Footnote ¹²