Ephemera Events, News & Exhibitions

The Ephemera Society Summer & Winter Fairs

A window into the past for both the curious and the collector — find rare, unusual and historic paper items, priced from £2 to over £2000. A huge range of ephemera will be on display. The fairs will be on for one day only so make a note in your diary now!

• Holiday Inn London Bloomsbury
• Coram Street
• London WC1N 1HT
• United Kingdom
• Entry £3 · 11am - 4pm · All welcome
• Members from 10am with membership cards
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This Is What Democracy Looked Like: A Visual History of the Printed Ballot

This bureaucratic piece of paper represents our long struggle to make elections free, fair, and honest. Printed ballots embody the material history of our democracy: its ideas, routines, and abuses. These ballots have a story to tell.

By the 1880s, the public demanded reforms to a clearly corrupt voting system. A new format from Australia introduced parameters that seem obvious to us now: an official ballot administered and distributed by the state, a nonpartisan layout that listed all the candidates on one sheet, and the most radical innovation: the ballot was to be marked in private.

This new format was not an immediate hit. While it offered equality and privacy, its adoption initiated our enduring history of contested voter intent and disputed mark making—and the end of freewheeling ballot design.

View the online exhibtion

Presented by the Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, USA.

Image: Detail from People’s Party Ticket, 1884, Massachusetts. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.

A Century of Dining Out: The American story in menus 1841-1941

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Henry Voigt the foremost authority on American menus -- has released an online preview of his upcoming Grolier Club exhibition, A Hundred Years of Dining Out: The American Story of Menus, 1841-1941.

Originally scheduled to open this month, the real-life exhibition has been postponed until December 7, 2022.

Academic Dress on Picture Postcards Published by Davis’s of Oxford, Their Rivals and Successors

The Burgon Society, @BurgonSoc, is an educational charity for the study of academical dress around the world.

The most recent edition of their journal is online and has an article about the academical dress on postcards by Alex Kerr and is free to read (PDF)

“Our weapon is public opinion” Posters of the women’s suffrage movement

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Display for the centenary of the 1918 Representation of the People Act – the parliamentary act that finally gave some women the vote.