Ephemera
By Bonnie Huelga

Ephemera:  From the Greek word ephemeros which means “for the day.”

 

Ephemera:  Printed material generally meant to be used for a limited time, then discarded.  This would include but not be limited to:  tickets, stamps, calendars, newspapers, menus, postcards, magazines, instruction manuals, and posters.

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The website www.tomfolio.com states “These flimsy fragments of paper trace our personal, national, political, and cultural histories as nothing else can.  These are the artifacts of our cultural history, meaningful to our understanding of who we are and where we came from…”

My husband is a collector of ephemera.  As a child growing up in Lapeer, Michigan, he amassed comic books, magazines, and newspapers of special events.  His fascination with these paper items probably influenced his choice of college degrees; he has a degree in History and another in Political Science.  As an adult, the collection grew even more.  Every time he changed addresses, the ephemera moved as well.  Some of the comic books and magazines have been moved eight times, finally coming to rest in Millersburg, Ohio.

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One evening, while browsing eBay in search of Millersburg Glass, Skip came across three listings of Carnival Glass club newsletters dating back to the 1960’s.  He bid on and won all three lots for a grand total of $50.  The seller lived only twenty minutes away in Baltic, Ohio so we opted to pick up the boxes and save a lot of shipping cost.  Upon inspection, Skip discovered the papers had belonged to Forrest and Margaret Hochstetler of Rittman, Ohio.  They were pioneers of carnival glass collecting.  The seller had purchased the newsletters as a box lot at a Monday night Kaufman Auction House sale.  Kaufman’s conducted several auctions that involved the dispersal of Forrest and Margaret’s massive holdings.

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The newsletters were indeed from the American Carnival Glass Association and the International Carnival Glass Association, as advertised.  But while sifting through the boxes, Skip found more than just the newsletters he thought he had purchased.  Forrest had also saved several hundred carnival glass auction flyers dating from 1968 through the 2000’s.  Some of the flyers included his notes and the prices realized at auction penciled in the margins.  The boxes also held eight years of the original carnival glass newsletter “Carnival Glass News-The Official Publication of the Society of Carnival Glass Collectors.”  This was the ultimate find for a historian who collects both Millersburg Glass and ephemera.

 

 

 

One of the auction flyers from the Forrest and Margaret Hochstetler collection