New York is packed with oddballs, so the sight on Saturday of your souvenir-hunting diarist trying to peel anti-Trump posters off construction hoardings fazed no pedestrians. After failing to detach a poster declaring TRUMP: ERES UN PENDEJO (“Trump: you’re a pubic hair”) I had to settle for one promoting a “mass, international, synchronized drinking protest” (#AShotAtDonald) under the banner “This sh*t has driven us to drink”. It’ll look good framed, after I’ve pieced together its torn fragments. Fly-posting Americans use stronger glue than we do.
Poster boy
But I love ephemera. I prize a poster peeled from a bus shelter about thirty years ago, appealing for donations to a fund for striking miners, with a naive drawing of a coal miner, his wife, and a pithead winding-wheel. For a few days these posters were everywhere. Now, framed on my wall, I possess perhaps the only one. I remember that happy quarter-hour with a bucket and sponge by the shelter on London’s Embankment. Bus passengers looked on as though I were crazy. How I wish I’d spent the afternoon collecting more.
Riveting stuff
So I’ll never forget our visit this weekend to New York’s Transit Museum, in Brooklyn. The history and memorabilia of the world’s most famous underground railway enthralled me. I can stare at rivets all day.
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Among all of this wonderful stuff, though, it was the ephemera that gripped me most. An entire underground station has been filled with a collection of subway cars through the last century. The technical developments are interesting enough but I couldn’t tear myself away from the advertisements.
Each car was furnished in its original fittings: the seats’ upholstery, the wood panelling, the lino floors — and the strips of ads above the seating. They tell you so much about their era, about attitudes, about what people admired or feared. It would take a historian’s tract to examine methodically the place of laundry in the cultural positioning of women in modern history, but the ads for Rinso say it all. The worship of machines, the social significance of the cigarette, the growing regard for convenience, the centrality of hygiene . . . these ads summed up in a snapshot what a 10,000-word dissertation might struggle to express.
In concept the 600-volt direct-current electrical power unit has altered little in 100 years. But marketing has moved from what on those subway-car panels looks like the Stone Age. Ephemera? If you say so.
The tills are alive . . .
And then to Philadelphia, for new signs of the times. I remember from 40 years ago a tumbleweed city, its industries declining and its historic heart hollowed out. There’s a renaissance there now. Life and stylishness have moved back into the centre. People drive in, not out, to shop. And at 5.30pm prompt we stood on a balcony at Wanamaker’s, one of the world’s first great department stores, a 12-floor temple to mammon completed in 1902. The twice-daily organ recital was about to begin.
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The emporium encircles its own “Grand Court”, a vast Aladdin’s cave overhung with cliffs of shopping aisles whose centrepiece is an amazing proprietor’s folly. The world’s largest pipe-organ spans many floors, keyboard clinging to an upper balcony amid busy bargain-hunters. Shopping pauses as the massive chords of music crash and thunder through the lingerie and soft toiletries. Customers applaud the organist, a tiny perched figure, sparrow on a cliff-face, lost in the immensity of retail. If you visit only Wanamaker’s, Philadelphia will still be worth the journey.
Pulp fiction
Before leaving we toured the Rosenbach Museum and Library. The Rosenbachs, 20th-century bibliophiles, stuffed two houses with their treasure. The first editions are world-class, but one brother had an interest in ephemera. Shelves of trashy novels, chosen for their unimportance, caught my attention. He knew how in the blink of an eye the commonplace can become rare.
Try to catch what’s blowing in the wind for you may catch the spirit of the age; and the wind will fast blow it away.