The Design and Printing of Ephemera in Britain and America, 1720‐1920

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2010), "The Design and Printing of Ephemera in Britain and America, 1720‐1920", Library Review, Vol. 59 No. 4, pp. 315-316. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242531011038677

Ephemera have shifted from being scarcely noticed and collected to being avidly examined and researched. The social and cultural historical value of ephemera like playbills and ABCs, printed music, valentine cards and retailers' bill‐heads was recognised early on. The fascination ephemera hold for historians of printing and publishing, and indeed of advertising too, has grown. The polarity between a mainstream printing/publishing strand (of finely printed books and journals) and a periphery of transient jobbing‐printed utilitarian work (like trade cards, song‐sheets, almanacs and toy‐books) breaks down once we examine ephemera closely.

Graham Hudson's survey not only opens up the many cross‐fertilisations (and some rivalries) between printers and engravers and designers in the UK and in the USA, but it also teases out why design is as important in and for ephemera as it is for anything purportedly mainstream. He also takes the reader into “artistic jobbing”, a seeming oxymoron until you look at the actual work accomplished. The period addressed by the book, 1720‐1920, allows Hudson to straddle the major production processes involved – engraving in wood and copper and steel, etching/intaglio work like etching, lithography and chromolithography, photographic applications and some of the by‐ways (like chromoxylography and collotype).

He refers the reader, as he progresses chronologically through the book, to the ways in which these processes worked, the presses on which they were produced, and some of the key guide books (like Moxon, Houghton, Harpel, and Richmond) and specimen books that set the tone for their periods in terms both of practical printing and of design features like typefaces and ornamentation, layout and design assumptions. In fact, the publishers identify this theme of design as being one of the distinctive features of Hudson's new study, and design does indeed appear regularly – how engravers and illustrators set out their work, how even poster and playbill display used type‐faces and imagery self‐consciously and how colour was used (and built on growing technical knowledge of compound‐plate printing and the like).

A wider perspective on this design comes from what Hudson explores when discussing the nineteenth century: it might be relatively garish (with stereotyped images and flashy types) in advertising and magazines, but in art‐printing influences came variously from William Morris, the Aesthetic movement, and from ideas about Japanese design. Hudson devotes a chapter to the Leicester free style (associated with Earhart in the 1880s), examples of whose work appear and reproduce Earhart's imaginative precision with colour superimpositions faithfully. Design is used, however, to interpret and describe the ephemera more effectively rather than turning into a study of design in its own right. That is for other works.

The main thrust of the book is to introduce (or reintroduce for specialists) the reader to the wide range of ephemera produced on both sides of the pond (and not only in capital cities) during the period. At times things moved forward in parallel, at others either one country or the other took the lead. Specimen books, stereotypes, printed products of all kinds were vigorously produced and in some cases imitated (Hudson includes some interesting plagiaries!). Underlying this, Hudson bases his study on a firm explanation of what processes were, what they enabled illustrators and printers to do (and what their constraints were) and, along with that, what assumptions of good practice and design seemed to prevail at the time. He also hints at what kinds of responses were elicited from people who saw and read ephemera, a field well worth researching more fully in the future.

A very attractive feature of the book lies in the quality of its reproductions – many in colour, many more in black‐and‐white, all crisply reproduced (with magnifications indicated). This allows any lecturer or student or researcher the opportunity to see examples without what are usually long journeys to specialist collections (like, in the UK, the John Johnson collection at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the St Bride Printing Library or the material at Reading University and its Centre for Ephemera Studies). Hudson has written widely on the subject and is secretary and founding member of the Ephemera Society (there is also an Ephemera Society of America). Readers will also have high expectations of any such book from these two publishers.

For readers of this review, and of Library Review itself, any work on ephemera will appeal to a well‐defined niche readership and to niche librarians. At this level of immediate appeal, then, the book is a winner: specialists may want more on design, contemporary printing, provincial printing and the like, but they will know where to go for more.