Sandvox Website Profile: “sheaff-ephemera”

I have always found myself keenly interested in a seemingly endless list of vintage things: stamps, postal history, trade cards, billheads, trade cards, broadsides, cartes-de-visite, stereo views, tickets, engravings, chromolithographs, early American glass, Irish blown three-mold glass, patent medicine bottles, flasks, almanacs, postcards, marbled paper, early letterpress printing, typography, books, African art, record album covers, airbrushed restaurant china, Micronesian tapa cloth . . . . I could go on and on, but you get the idea. I've long thought that what I'd most like to do in life, in some better world, would be to put out an ongoing series of high-quality, small publications about such things. As a graphic and publication designer with all the appropriate software, one would think I'd be in a fine position to do just that. But it ain't that easy. Especially in today's publishing and economic environment, the idea of putting out a lot of ink-on-paper is just not practical. Or even sane. Eventually I realized that what I can do—and fairly easily—is scan the images, write the words and then simply post them online. I get it out of my system, and the material gets out there in front of the eyes of anyone who may be interested. Win win. So, here goes . . . I will start with some particular interests: trade cards, Artistic Printing, Typotecture, Type Pictures, chromolithography, letterpress printing, early militia notices and other early american paper and printing. Dick Sheaff

My site will likely be of interest to graphic and publication designers, typographers, typesetters, ephemera collectors, paper collectors, stamp collectors (philatelists), letterpress printers, lithographic printers, archivists, librarians, book collectors, artists, illustrators, historians, glass collectors, museums and puzzle collectors.

I know of no other non-commercial site or blog like this one on theses subjects.

Once I'd published the site (yesterday), I sent email notification to some relevant people, and immediately began to receive the first of dozens of responses. Quite a few began with "WOW!!!" or some slight variation thereof. Some vowed to pass my URL along to many others ASAP.