Ephemera is the plural form of the Greek word Ephemeron (Epi = on, about, round; Hemera = day). Literally, it refers to something that lasts through the day. And here at the DeGolyer, it refers to one of our favorite categories of collecting. Among our holdings of Ephemera are such things as almanacs, advertisements, bank checks, billheads, bonds, broadsides, brochures, business cards, calendars, catalogs, comic books, currency, folders, greeting cards, invitations, labels, menus, pamphlets, passes, postcards, posters, programs, rewards of merit, sheet music, songsters, stock certificates, tickets, timetables, and trade cards. We hold these things in the tens of thousands.
Ephemera include all those paper materials meant, by and large, to be used and thrown away. For the student of printing, engraving, or lithography, ephemeral specimens can be studied in their own right. For broader historical questions, ephemera can shed new light on the times in which the ephemera was made, distributed, and used. Also, many pieces of ephemera have genuine artistic merit and continue to please the eye. Designed to be transitory, ephemera nonetheless has enduring value.
A case in point is this wonderful recent acquisition, a scrapbook with over 600 American hotel labels, dating from roughly 1900-1960. The anonymous compiler included 115 California hotels and over 550 hotel labels from other states, including Texas.
Like everything that is made, hotel labels have a history. According to Maurice Rickards, The Encyclopedia of Ephemera: A Guide to the Fragmentary Documents of Everyday Life for the Collector, Curator, and Historian (New York: Routledge, 2000), hotel labels evolved from the baggage sticker, first issued by shipping companies to passengers as an aide to identification and dockside handling. The first stickers were fairly simple and carried space for the passenger’s name, sailing date, cabin number, and destination.
By the end of the 19th century, the hotel industry adopted the sticker and began adding graphic images and designs of their own to take advantage of this form of free advertising. By
the 1920s and 1930s, the hotel label had adopted a recognizable poster style. Much-travelled guests began to acquire stickers to the point of ostentation, Rickards writes, plastering their luggage with examples from all their trips. Airlines, in turn, joined railway and steamship lines in the effort to promote their brands.
By the 1960s, an increasingly sophisticated public began to view the practice of labeling one’s luggage with dozens of souvenirs as vaguely juvenile and the production of hotel baggage labels began to decline. But one can occasionally find examples of hotel labels to this day.
We retain our juvenile enthusiasm, however, and encourage armchair tourists and other researchers to spend some time with this genre (Call number: A2024.0015X) and with other ephemeral forms in the DeGolyer Library. We’ll check your bags but we won’t label them.