They don't make them like this anymore #2 - Vintage early 20th century Christmas cracker novelties

Even now, in deepest darkest cynical adulthood, when Christmas comes around I find myself irrevocably drawn to the contents of the Christmas cracker.  As a child they were the most excellent bonus to Christmas dinner or Boxing Day tea, and while the hats and jokes felt irrelevant to the festivities, the often intricate and sometimes bizarre plastic toys and gifts provided much glee and entertainment to Christmas mealtimes. It's difficult to find quality crap items in a cracker these days. There is no joy to be found in a "luxury" cracker where the gift might be a packet of golf tees or a lanyard to put your glasses on. Sometimes all you want is a tiny pack of cards or a tiny plastic magnifying glass or a fortune telling fish, and these items are becoming increasingly hard to find. Perhaps the fascination with cracker novelties runs in my genes, as here are 3 great examples that belonged to an old great aunt. She must have saved them as a child back nearly 100 years ago now, they may possibly be of a later date, as she may have saved them as an adult, like I have done with many of my ephemeral items. There are parts missing but it's still possible to recognise the objects for what they are - the Christmas pudding has lost his arms and the clock has lost its pendulum but the little clown, however, is perfectly intact in all his 3 dimensions.

 Coin shows the scale for these perfectly formed Christmas Cracker novelties Circa 1920's

 The clown is moulded metal, possibly lead, with lovely details on front and back, including a great pair of buttocks showing through his satin pantaloons

 The Pudding has lost his arms, but still has his little metal legs coming out of his wooden body.

ROMA Photo Souvenir

Here's an old "Photo Souvenir" from Rome. I love these little pocket time travelling glimpses into the recent past especially when the subject matter concerns the relics of the distant past. The concept is so simple and the construction follows suit - tiny snaps in a simple paper wrap.  There is something gratifying about opening the wrap each time and ritualistically putting the photocards back after viewing them. The other simplistic joy they offer is the minor irregularity in size of the cards - they all fit into the paper but as they are of slightly different dimensions they form a unique deckled edge each time they are viewed and returned to the paper wrap. As with many of these items, you can't buy the modern equivalent today - at least not with the same exquisite simplicity. As with old type printed items there is a slight impression in the printed text - the text possesses the surface it is printed into. This rarely happens in modern printing where the print is seemingly digitally pasted into the surface. You get something extra from these objects just from running your fingers over the print. How aptly romantic for such a souvenir from one of Europe's most enchanting of cities. When I look at these cards I am nearly always reminded of the excellent short story "Roman Fever" by Edith Wharton. Short stories are similar to ephemera in that they are brief but tangible and can remain in your conscience long after you think you've disregarded them. Similarly they can be retrieved and revisited and brought to life by other imagery. You can read Roman Fever here. Items like these have always inspired me in my own work - see here - my version captures the essence, but perhaps not quite the romantic side of a place.

 

 

 

 

Paper and photographs with letterpress. Comprises of 16 photo cards. Approx. 55mm x 45mm x 6mm

Brooke Bond Teacard - Wild Birds In Britain

Tea  and cigarette cards, once given free in packs of well known brands are the epitome of ephemera. They can be collected and treasured or treated as mere rubbish and discarded with the empty box or packet. For me, there is in these tiny cards, a poetry. Not unlike a haiku, they are complete in wisdom and beauty. The small and compact size demanded tight and concise design and typesetting and the result is almost always a perfectly balanced combination of illustration and information. The narrative aspect flows from image to text in a continuous loop - just keep turning it over and over.
Portable and instant they serve as a cache of facts more immediate and intoxicating than any search engine hit for the same information.

Like a flock of visiting winter birds, the set of these cards, illustrated by C.F. Tunnicliffe 

are beautiful both as a collection and as individual cards 

Brooke Bond issued these cards in 1965, they measure 68mm x 36mm

 

A large flock of waxwings have been visiting my local area since November. As it says on the back of the tea card, the birds are driven south by bad weather in a search of food, it could be years before they visit here again. Even though they are fleeting visits, I look out for them, despite that they may be long gone to another berry tree on a distant moor. Along with the trivia from daily events, rare bird sightings become catalogued in the memory as cerebral ephemera, stored away and ready for retrieval for some future query of time or place, or just for the pure joy of remembering an ephemeral event.

Naylors of Bakewell Glass Dish

Can a piece of glassware be regarded as ephemera? The advertising on this little glass tray seems to make it so. The gorgeous hand rendered text - which on its own is a joy to look at after the eye has been  numbed by the vulgarity of digital type - and the red on white demand attention by default. Even the cheeky everso slightly creepy humanoid-porcine face looks directly at you from within the litho. It's not often that you get the animal's face on the advert for the meat it belongs to these days.  Supermarket packaging seems to assume we don't want to associate the animal with the food as if it will somehow make it distasteful.

Naylors of Bakewell Glass dish 12 x 9 cm C. 1950-60's maybe later.

By its nature an unbroken glass object is potentially ephemeral. It's always poised to become changed and fractured yet still recognisable in parts as its original self. Bakewell, the small Peak District town from where this dish originates is much the same. I spent many childhood summers in and around Bakewell, blissfully unaware that as time and progress advanced the place would change so much from the way I knew it.

The Bakewell of the 21st Century is a pastiche of the place I knew as a little girl. Doubtless the Bakewell of my Childhood in the 1980's was a different one to that of my Father's or Grandfather's and indeed my Great-Great Grandfather who farmed in the area, but I can't help feel that things have changed just a little too far beyond reasonable progress. The life blood of the place has been let, and what remains is a pale mirage amongst the ruins of the original. Although there is still a cattle market every Monday and a traditional Lammas cattle fair in the guise of Bakewell Show, the redevelopment of the market square and the placing of a supermarket in the heart of the farmer's exchange somehow seems to sum up the slow exsanguination of this ancient working rural town.

I've never worked out if this dish was intended to be an ashtray, or simply just an object with an advert on it. Naylors the butchers is long gone from Bakewell, but it's good to know that local butchers in the area still go to market every week and pick the finest beasts for their handmade pies and sausages.

They don't make them like this anymore #1

Beautiful design and print - check
Heavy fibrous old paper with a delightful sweet scent  of lost city adventure - check
Added unique narrative glimpse of someone's day out to London town - check
Nostalgic by pure default - check

Woman's Weekly Muppets / Rupert Knitting Pattern

As a big Rupert fan I'm thrilled to have in my collection this pull out knitting pattern from a 1980's edition of Woman's Weekly. A Great-Aunt of mine used to get WW and she used to knit me some of the toys or jumpers that often featured as part of the magazine. Indeed the knitting patterns were no doubt part of the selling point of the magazine ( along with no small thanks to Roger Royle and the Robin Family ) It's something to note that you might be hard pressed to find a knitting pattern of any description in a contemporary general interest magazine aimed at the modern woman - even in perhaps the publications such as Prima that push the craft lifestyle choice to the reader. People just don't knit anymore - any why should they even bother to learn when it's cheaper to buy a mass produced garment shipped in from China.

Anyway, I do remember this knitting pattern at the time of publication. As to the date I think I must have been just a little over the age for wanting to sport a Rupert or Kermit jumper despite a continued but perhaps more closeted love for Rupert as teenage years loomed. So I think perhaps Circa 1987 for this pull out. There is some comfort that the Muppets and Rupert still endure and delight as the years pass but almost as certain as the absence of knitting patterns in current woman's magazines I can bet that if someone were to knit these jumpers up today they would cost a pretty penny in such fashion emporiums aimed at the youth and would be sported with much confused post modern irony down Brighton's Laines and beyond. Or maybe I'm projecting a little here . . . .

9/11

Tesco rice packet, 2001

Stopping By Pubs On A Summer Evening

When the dog days of July are over and the sun, without warning it seems, starts to wane towards the equinox, I think back to the days of my childhood and the late August summer holidays. I think of runner beans and woodsmoke, the absence of song from the exhausted blackbirds and the sudden twilight where there was once a long summer evening. As night descends, a melancholy scent fills the air from the tree leaves as they start to dry out before the decay. Not quite yet the crisper nights of early autumn; there is enough of the evening left for a pub visit on a late summer evening.  Somewhere in August 2011 a robin changes his song to his haunting winter notes and I'm taken back to 1980, with my family and we've stopped at a pub on the way home from a trip to Scarborough. Glasses of hock or shandy for the grown ups, lemon and lime for me and a bag of salt and vinegar walkers crisps, the green of the packet an echo to the verdant glory of the summer and a longing for the holidays to never end. Always at these country pubs the drinks would appear along with the necessary beer mat. Thick and dry or wet and pulpy, bright and bold and always scented - either fresh from the stack, wet and sodden with beer, or vaguely perfumed with the dried splashes of alcohol, they have always fascinated me.

I bought a carrier bag full of beer mats from a shop in Hastings one summer about 10 years ago. It was August and I was lamenting the long lost summers of the early 1980's. Many of the coasters are probably from the 1970's but nonetheless trigger those memories of childhood summers of the early 1980's. In the cultural landscape of the 1970's, percieved sexual prowess sold alcohol to men, or at least made the drinker feel more desirable to the female sex. For the brewery, connecting your product with the drinker's penis has to be a surefire winner.  For the woman ( or doe-eyed '70's "girl" ) it was about impressing a male archetype at a job interview. However, the emphasis was not on career - Babycham assumed that the girl wouldn't be power dressing in the prospective job. Non the less Babycham would gird her with the important wiles and common sense she was obviously lacking for a job interview. I'm not entirely convinced that many things have changed in the 30 years since these beer mats came into being - not least the methods of selling alcohol, but some things do change for the better. Stamped upon this printed liquor-ringed cardboard is a poweful glimpse of a past cultural landscape. In these textured gaudy pieces of cardboard we behold the power of the ephemeral item to convey and bear witness to a past time - and the ironies that only the passing of time and age can amass.

Aside from the almost charming and seemingly innocent playful sexism on these mats, I adore the tactile beauty of the offset registration and the patterns where the ink has half taken to the texture. Printing techniques like this ensured that no two mats were alike, much like a snowflake, and all the more beautiful  for their archived existence.

There are dozens of beermats in my collection and I'll show more in later posts ( there's a promise to keep ) but for now, here are 2 selected at random that take me back to the early '80's and  stopping by pubs on a summer evening . . . 

Attention Men! Drinking our sex in a bottle will get you the girl like this one! she's waiting to fellate you into the next working week!

But if you don't get the girl, don't worry, have a wank, we'll even show you how! - it's what your right arm's for after all

Rupert and Collecting

In the early 1980's my Grandmother used to cut out the Rupert panels from the Daily Express and save them for me. She also saved for me PG Tips tea cards, stamps and other various items of interest. I had many of these Rupert cuttings but throughout the years of desk culls and sorting through drawers only a treasured few remain in my collection.

Daily Express Newspaper Clipping Circa 1983

As with all good newspaper ephemera, they exhibit tiny gems of information from the time of print. Rupert, of course, transcends any age, he will always live innocently in the fabled world that many Express or Daily Mail readers wail over as a lost paradise, all the more enchanting to right wing idealists because it never really existed. On the reverse are listings for ITV's "Duty Free", the sitcom based on the Spanish package holiday boom that reached glory days in the '80's. We also get a snippet of the dining experiences on offer to the average tabloid reader - Beefeater Restaurants. Breaded mushrooms remained a staple of '30's built mock Tudor dining establishments well into the mid 1990s ( I served hundreds of thousands during a 3 year stint as a Sous Chef at a Tetley restaurant pub) More associated 1980's content in later posts.

Daily Express Newspaper Clipping Circa 1983 - reverse

Back to our little bear friend. As a vehicle for narrative, illustration and storytelling, Rupert is about as pure and as delightful as it gets. I was a big Rupert fan and still am when it comes to the original drawings. I'm not enamoured by current responses to the Rupert brand and if anything sums up the perils of being tied to the renderings of the digital age than this.

On the presumption that this site is an on-line content response to a client's brief, I still find the style garish and unsophisticated and as a result patronising to the developing child. I don't lay the blame on the designer completely. I've worked with many clients who think they know what children want, but are instead obsessed with what they think children want and as a consequence create a sterile response to what should be magical and inviting. The pure beauty found in the original line drawings has been squashed and overwhelmed by the solid pre-school block colours and crude shapes. I'm protective over the original Rupert charm, but nostalgia for my own childhood put aside, I really don't like this "modern" update.

I'm quite sure that all of the client's boxes were ticked - all but the "retain original charm and magic" requisite. Rupert doesn't need re branding for younger children of for any stage of a child's development. The original format panels show how the rhyming couplet caption translates the story perfectly for the younger child. They are captivated by the illustrations and the verse before they progress to the lengthier text, and when they are able to enjoy the text their experience continues to be enriched by the illustrations.

It's not all bad for Rupert. Some older animations of the franchise held close to the beauty and charm of the original line drawings. Geoff Dunbar's Frog Chorus  holds the essence of the original Rupert drawings enhanced via the animation process with empathy and skill. Nostalgic or not, that can't be denied.

When I handle the Rupert clipping I occasionally wonder if I would have had the same love of ephemera if I had been born later. Children growing up now find themselves forced into an age of instant gratification of information and virtual visual reward . If I was a child now, would my grandmother have sent me - in place of saving a clipping from the paper -  a link to the Rupert Eco Explorer's site, which I would have bookmarked and, 25 years later would I think to retrieve the link and imagined my grandmother clicking on the send button? I'd rather have my cut out yellowed newspaper clippings with the edges made by my grandmother's scissors, rendered jagged by the slight tremor that she had in her later years.