Most archives have hard-to-classify items that don’t fit neatly into existing record series or collections. Sometimes these items can be interesting as artifacts or may contain valuable information, or both! Here at SMA, such items often find a home in our Ephemera collection.
Ephemera is a great collection to browse for visually interesting materials like old letterhead, business cards, bumper stickers, tickets, buttons, pamphlets, and posters. Topics covered include Seafair, sports, streetcars, theaters, World War I and II, advertisements, and much more. Over 150 objects from the collection have been scanned and are available at our Digital Collections site, and you’ll also find some selected images from the collection included in our Cabinet of Curiosities Flickr album.
Materials kept within the collection may not have found a home elsewhere. For example, water meter catalogs are not strictly within the collecting scope of the archives but have secondary, as well as visual, value. Similarly, items like a circa 1960s city motor pool sticker, Pink Elephant Car Wash coupon, streetcar ticket from 1940, and circa 1920s voter registration card may have been originally created to be temporary and disposable, but today they give us unique and interesting glimpses into everyday Seattle life.
Ephemera collections aren’t always heavily used by researchers, but they can be a fun place to look for the unexpected!