Comments on: Printed Ephemera

Printed Ephemera

jonson — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 09:42:13 -0800

Civil War Posters, Soviet Children's Books, 19th Century Shipping Posters, and much, much more are all part of this Flickr user's amazing collection of printed ephemera.

By: isopraxis

isopraxis — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 10:21:57 -0800

Awesome collection.

By: the cuban

the cuban — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 10:39:50 -0800

Some great images, but most of them are frustratingly small. Liked this one.

By: EatTheWeak

EatTheWeak — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 10:41:07 -0800

This is an excellent post! I look forward to browsing this on and off all day. Here's an early favorite.

By: peacay

peacay — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 10:48:51 -0800

I have mixed feelings about sites that display material without acknowledging the source. I'm not claiming that this person doesn't in fact own all these books and posters but I don't see any details listed at all. Soviet childrens' books calls to mind for me the collections at McGill University and the International Institute of Social History for instance. But this is a flickr site so I guess the motives are less called into question versus the sort of misrepresentation that the Shorpy site (posted to the blue the other day) propogates by taking Library of Congress material and constructing a blog without noting the source.

By: blasdelf

blasdelf — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 11:43:04 -0800

I'm with you on the linking issue, the way sites like englishrussia rake in the AdWords dollars off the blogohype without ever publishing outbound links is reprehensible. As for the LoC stuff, it's partially because memory.loc.gov is mostly unlinkable -- most every URL is quite impermanent tied to your session. Shorpy tends to give enough metadata to be able to search the LoC for the original TIFF versions (which for some reason the LoC doesn't bother to compress at all, ballooning file-size for no reason).

By: peacay

peacay — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 12:11:06 -0800

I understand the linking problem - I think actually you have to link to a search result page**. Shorpy should have it in plain sight on the front page or in an about section that their source is LoCongress. They have mentioned LoC a grand total of 4 times among the 80+ images on 15+ pages. Englishrussia is certainly a culprit. Both times I commented there citing the original source my comments were deleted. They tried to appease me the first time by emailing and claiming ignorance but they were lying -- we had both seen it (photos of some sort) via dirty.ru (one of their consistent sources for links). It was at dirty.ru and on a russian LJ site (who posted the original images) and nowhere else. **Actually this link for instance takes you to an example catalogue record with thumbnail (note the URL changes in the address field). The catalogue record link is located in 'Digital Record' near the bottom of the page. It's not that hard.

By: peacay

peacay — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 12:15:06 -0800

[oh...interesting that when I did the site search at shorpy for 'library of congress' the only advert in the sidebar for sponsored links was...The Library of Congress. How odd.]

By: anthill

anthill — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 12:25:35 -0800

Now it's digital ephemera... who will collect the lolcats when the power goes out?

By: Dizzy

Dizzy — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 13:49:39 -0800

jonson-- Your finds are ALWAYS the epitome of coolio! I was gonna vacuum the nursery, but think I'll spend the rest of the day browsing your excellent post. (Dust gives little babies immunity from the pox, yes?)

By: squidfartz

squidfartz — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 15:14:07 -0800

2nd post to blow my mind today. Thank you, jonson. Really.

By: Alvy Ampersand

Alvy Ampersand — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 17:38:47 -0800

Verrry noice!

By: flapjax at midnite

flapjax at midnite — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 18:23:25 -0800

Great post, thanks jonson.

By: Flood

Flood — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 08:14:13 -0800

impressive stuff