I was on my way out of the auction house, having seen nothing I wanted to buy, when I decided to stop and browse at three tables near the door. The last table held flat…
Category: Ephemera/Paper/Documents
A lovely doll steamer trunk with a Victorian feel
Posted in Children, Ephemera/Paper/Documents, Personal items, and travel
When I first saw the small trunk sitting atop a glass case, I thought “treasure chest.” It was black all over with stained wooden planks and tiny round nail heads both decorating and holding the…
Someone may have kept the two bright sunshine-yellow and forest-green road guides as a way to remember their travel adventure. They’d gone to the Delaware Motor Club office in Wilmington, DE, on June 25, 1947,…
1968 Phila. (Rizzo) proclamation targeting protesters
Posted in Black history, civil rights movement, and Ephemera/Paper/Documents
The bright yellow sheet was hidden beneath a pile of nothing papers, and I wouldn’t have found it if I wasn’t in the habit of combing through documents at auction. It was in a cheap…
Should you collect the Tubman $20 bill?
Posted in collectibles, Ephemera/Paper/Documents, and history
When I learned that Harriet Tubman would be the face on the new $20 bill, I rejoiced. She is a woman so deserving of such an honor. Then the collector in me asked a practical…
Simple form leads to history of POW camps in U.S.
Posted in Ephemera/Paper/Documents, history, and Military
What an odd but interesting document, I thought, as I spied the blank form titled “Prisoner of War” inside a plastic covering on the auction table. I’d never seen anything like it before and wondered…
Cellophane tape holds together 1949 ‘Dear Jane’ letter
Posted in Ephemera/Paper/Documents, and Uncategorized
The sheet of paper looked like a puzzle. It was covered in a crazy patchwork of cellophane tape that had turned golden-brown with age. It was a handwritten letter that had been ripped into pieces and…
Panther Bobby Seale fires them up at black history showcase
Posted in Black history, and Ephemera/Paper/Documents
Bobby Seale looked at me stonily, wearily. He had spoken for an hour on the founding of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1966, and then had spent another 60 minutes signing his 1996…
The table held several flats of fans, but the ones that drew me held a story. They were diverse in both their images and messages, silently imparting slices of our cultural history. This wasn’t the first time I’d seen…