On first glance, the cards were innocuous. One showed a brunette in a bright yellow dress stepping out of a convertible with red-hot seats, her legs exposed. The other was a redhead in white shorts…
Category: Ephemera/Paper/Documents
The images were darling, these action figures drawn from a comic book’s page and in a child’s hands. The boy who drew them had written his name neatly and cleanly on each page of the…
Judaica artifacts are a mystery to me
Posted in collectibles, Culture, Ephemera/Paper/Documents, and Religion
The special items up for auction that Sunday in December smacked you right in your face as you walked through the door. They were laid out on tables, stacked on shelves in glass cases, hung on…
Advertising art with African American faces
Posted in Art, Black history, and Ephemera/Paper/Documents
The advertising art seemed to magically appear – again. Two weeks before, one of my favorite auction houses had propped stacks of the illustrations on racks against a wall. A white guy raising a glass…
Bazooka bubble gum comics
Posted in collectibles, Ephemera/Paper/Documents, and Games
The white envelope was pretty inconspicuous there on the auction table, because I had passed the table several times and had not noticed it. This time, though, I was just picking up stuff – two…
An autobiography by a female slave?
Posted in Black history, Books, Ephemera/Paper/Documents, and slavery
I was checking out the upcoming sale at one of my favorite auction houses when I came across a novel by a female slave. I was familiar with William Wells Brown’s novel “Clotel,” but one…
I didn’t notice the letter to Thomas Jefferson lying there in the glass case at the auction house next to a document that I had to touch, to see. Jefferson’s letter wasn’t a piece of ephemera that had grabbed…
The simple art of advertising
Posted in Art, and Ephemera/Paper/Documents
Flipping through a box of newspaper display art, I was thrilled as I stopped during a walk-through at one of my favorite auction houses. I’d been a newspaper reporter and editor and reporter for years, but rarely made…
While I waited for a train to Center City Philadelphia, I allowed my mind to wonder about the drawing I had seen in the newspaper the day before. It was an 1864 engraving of generations…