Pilgrim’s Progress
Let us bother the librarian once again . Let us ask him to reach down, dust, and hand over to us that little brown book over there, the Memoirs of Mrs. Pilkington, three volumes bound in one, printed by Peter Hoey in Dublin, MDCCLXXVI. The deepest obscurity shades her retreat; the dust lies heavy on her tomb — one board is loose, that is to say, and nobody has read her since early in the last century when a reader, presumably a lady, whether disgusted by her obscenity or stricken by the hand of death, left off in the middle and marked her place with a faded list of goods and groceries.
-Virginia Woolf, Lives of the Obscure
My library contains a shadow library: an archive of handbills, tax notices, insurance cards, and silk scraps. There is an occasional bookmark, designed for the purpose. But otherwise, it’s often hard to tell whether the advertisements for remedies and social events were placed in service of the book (to hold one’s place), or whether the book served the paper: a convenient filing cabinet. Filleted away in the pages of parsing books and Pilgrim’s Progress, the books bear traces of readers, but also of life — and death — outside their pages.
I understand these scraps better than many of the books. Cicero doesn’t speak to me like the advertisement for Plain and Fancy Dancing does. The life cycle of ephemera is like a sine wave. Its value vacillates. Immediately important — for attending a dance, sending a note, remembering a product — it plummets into uselessness after this initial purpose is served. But ephemera keeps coming back. Susan Sontag wrote of snapshots: “Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.”
Ephemera has a similarly sinusoidal valuation. The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t even provide its book history term, preferring instead the adjectival form, which describes a person or thing’s transitory existence. Samuel Johnson is often cited as the first to use the term to describe newspapers and pamphlets, or “the papers of the day,” in 1751. In the twentieth century, ephemera expanded to include other printed materials that were not meant to last.
But, they do.
One of the first collections of ephemera to be acquired by a major library was assembled by John Johnson, a papyrologist and printer, in the early twentieth century. He described his collection, which ended up at the Bodleian Library in 1968, as “everything which a museum or library would not ordinarily accept if it were offered as a gift.” It includes bus tickets, bookplates, and broadsides, calling cards and cigar bands, playbills and a plethora more. In a recent survey of ephemera, Susan Garner writes: “Today, the Johnson Collection stands as one of the most historically significant collections of materials assembled with one common feature — a tendency to be thrown away.”
Indeed, many of these things are meant to be thrown away. But, the amateur, accidental archivist can’t bear to do so. Not yet. And then that ‘not yet’ multiplies into months and years, then generations. It outlives moths and mold and estate sales.
And, that’s how I ended up with Hiram A. Johnson’s “Reward of Merit,” which was preserved in his father’s miniature copy of Pilgrim’s Progress. Printed rewards were popular in religious and secular schools in the nineteenth century, though there are some earlier examples. They recognized piety and, eventually, good manners and behavior beyond the Biblical. Think of them like the shiny stickers of yesteryear. Contrary to popular belief, positive reinforcement was not invented for Generations X through Z.
Hiram, born in 1826, was one of Sarah Bemis and Josiah Johnson’s ten children. The “Reward of Merit” praised his “diligent application to study, punctuality in attendance, and exemplary behavior.” He worked as a shoemaker for a couple years before he died, at age 19, of a “hemorage” [sic], according to the town coroner’s records.
Josiah Johnson, Hiram’s father, dated his copy of Pilgrim’s Progress Sept 22, 1826, the same year that his son was born. And in it, his son’s reward remained long after the boy’s own reward was collected. Here, ephemera marks the ephemeral.
