During a recent trip to Goodwill (I keep meaning to write a post about looking for typewriters at thrift stores, a strategy which, despite its cliched reputation as a cornucopia of rare machines, has failed to result in a single find) I came across an old booklet of vintage office forms, bundled with a small pad of typing paper. Kaching!
It was the typing paper I was really after, but in the days following my purchase, I found myself a more interested in the forms, and started using them to type up grocery lists. I can't remember the last time I filled out, or typed, a paper form. There was something very satisfying about squaring up the typebars on my SM-9 with the boxes and lines, stamped on the brittle old onionskin with faded red and black ink.
As Monda of Fresh Ribbon will tell you, ephemera is yours for the bidding on eBay, which opens up a whole new way to spend money on weird old stuff, for those of us inclined to do so (sheepishly raising own hand). If you find yourself interested in predigital paper office forms, dog-eared ticket stubs, elegant old letterhead, and other paper-based flotsam predating the 21st century, you're not alone. The Ephemera Society of America can supply you with conferences, exhibitions, news, and society memberships to help you interact with others of your nostalgic, paper-based kind.
And you thought it was just you.
Notes:
- I wanted to append this post with a scan of one of my forms, but that will have to wait until another day. I have apparently misplaced them under more modern piles of ephemera including Ikea catalogs, New Yorker magazines, and Winnie the Pooh coloring book pages, all of which I expect to see at the Ephemera of America annual conference in 2059.
- Check out Marty Weil's Ephemera blog!
- Here is the largest ephemera group that I found on Flickr (but do a group search- there are many specific groups). Let me just re-state how much I love Flickr. So many social media sites are just noisy but Flickr is truly a resource.
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