Current Exhibition in the Library Company’s
Louise Lux-Sions and Harry Sions Gallery:
Remnants of Everyday Life: Historical Ephemera in the Workplace, Street, and Home
May 13–December 13, 2013
Gallery Open: Monday–Friday, 9:00 a.m.–4:45 p.m.
Remnants of Everyday Life: Historical Ephemera in the Workplace, Street, and Home highlights the Library Company's vast collection of ephemera from the 18th to the early 20th century. With materials ranging from throw-away items to finely printed works, Remnants of Everyday Life considers the cultural impact of advancements in mass production technologies.
The exhibition will address the evolution of the graphic design of ephemera; ephemera associated with women's role in the home, such as scrapbooks; the changing nature of leisure activities and consumerism over the course of the 19th century; and the life-cycle of commercial ephemera between the workplace, street, and home.
Old and young, rich and poor, our forbearers participated in a vibrant popular culture whose medium was printed ephemera. Remnants will exhibit broadsides, playbills, fliers, postcards, trade cards, tickets, menus, World's Fair souvenirs, labels, stereographs, albums, scrapbooks, paper dolls and other ephemeral toys and games, and advertisements. Specific examples include the 1897 billhead for Mrs. Henrietta S. Duterte, an African American undertaker and possibly the first female embalmer in the country; examples of Victorian-era paper bags, including the-then novel "Square Bag" patented in 1872; the seminal 1870 printing manual Typographia, which broke new ground for commercial graphic design; and one of the first illustrated circus posters issued in 1828.
The Library Company has been collecting ephemera since 1785, when it acquired the Pierre Eugène Du Simitière collection of Revolutionary War-era pamphlets and broadsides. Today it has one of the largest, most important, and most varied collections of early American ephemera in existence. In 2012, the Library Company completed a two-year project funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities to arrange, catalog, and selectively digitize nearly 30,000 pieces of 18th- and 19th-centry ephemera.
An outgrowth of this project, Remnants of Everyday Life, curated by Visual Culture Program co-Directors Rachel D'Agostino and Erika Piola, is on view from Monday, May 13, through Friday, December 13, 2013. In a public talk scheduled in conjunction with the exhibition opening, Dr. Ellen Gruber Garvey will discuss the history of scrapbooking.
The exhibition and its accompanying programming are supported by funds from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Philadelphia Cultural Fund.
Exhibition on View:
May 13, 2012–December 13, 2013
Gallery Open
Monday–Friday, 9:00 a.m.–4:45 p.m.
EXHIBITIONS AVAILABLE ONLINE
Online exhibitions are arranged by title, click on image to view.
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Ardent Spirits: The Origins of the American Temperance Movement |
Art & Artifacts: Discover the Library Company's Art and Artifact Collection |
Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer |
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Black Founders: The Free Black Community in the Early Republic |
Building a City of the Dead: The Creation and Expansion of Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill Cemetery |
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Capitalism by Gaslight: The Shadow Economies of 19th-Century America |
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Catching A Shadow: Daguerreotypes in Philadelphia, 1839-1860
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Celebrating 40 Years: The Print & Photograph Department, 1971-2011 |
The Centennial Exhibition, Philadelphia, PA |
The Crisis of the Union: An Electronic Archive of Documents about the Causes, Conduct, and Consequences of the U.S. Civil War |
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The Emancipation Proclamation: One Step Toward Freedom |
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"Every Man His Own Doctor:" Popular Medicine in Early America |
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Endless Amusement: Jesse Lentz VCP Artist-in-Residence Intern, Summer 2012 |
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Faces and Facades of Philadelphia: Three Decades of Portraits by John Frank Keith |
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Far from the Path of Virtue: Women on the Margins of Morality in Antebellum America
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From the Bottom Up: Popular Reading & Writing in the Michael Zinman Collection of Early American Imprints |
The Genesis of Republicanism: The Birth and Growth of the Grand Old Party, 1854-1872 |
The Hook and the Book: The Emergence of Crochet and Knitting in Early American Popular Culture |
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Ice Skating in 19th Century America: A Pictorial View |
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In Disguise: Cross Dressing and Gender Identity |
Intersections: Scriptures, Prints and Paintings in Antebellum America |
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John A. McAllister's Civil War: The Philadelphia Home Front |
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John Brown: 150 Years from the Raid |
The Liberation of Jane Johnson |
Living Color: Collecting Color Plate Books at The Library Company of Philadelphia |
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Mirror of a City: Views of Philadelphia Recently Acquired from the Jay T. Snider Collection |
Nineteenth-Century Pharmacists’ Trade Cards from the William H. Helfand Collection |
Pennsylvania German Broadsides: Windows into an American Culture |
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Philadelphia Gothic: Murders, Mysteries, Monsters, and Mayhem Inspire American Fiction, 1798-1854 |
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Philadelphia on Stone: The First Fifty Years of Commercial Lithography, 1828-1878
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Portraits of American Women: Women Writers, Women in Religion, and Women of the Republican Court |
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Richard Allen: Apostle of Freedom |
Risky Business: Winning and Losing in the Early American Economy, 1780-1850 |
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“This Extraordinary Woman”: Portraits of Female Curiosities in Early American Print Culture |
