Here’s a wonderful thing. It’s a beautiful two-colour advertising flyer for Maidstone Gin, dating from the late 19th Century. I have recently bought a big scrap-book of ephemera relating to Mr Grant’s Distillery and I was delighted to discover that there is a new distillery in the town continuing the tradition of gin-production in Kent. You can read all about it here.
I am always looking to buy collections of ephemera. The name means ‘short-lived’ and here’s a good way to think about it. Imagine a person going into a book shop a hundred years ago. They buy a book, the assistant puts it in a paper bag and the customer goes home to read it. Then the book sits on a shelf, gets passed down through the generations until eventually I go along and buy it. But what happened to that paper bag?
The book could be very rare now – but not as rare as the bag! It was never meant to survive, just like the flyer here. The collection and study of these short-lived ephemeral items is a very popular hobby. I’m a member of The Ephemera Society and I’ll be taking the scrap book along to one of our Fairs soon. In the meantime if you have any collections of ephemera please do get in touch. I buy plenty of books, postcards, prints and maps – but I really do need a good lot of ephemera for the year ahead.
And fourteen shillings and six pence is what we now call seventy two and a half pence by the way – and that was for a gallon, not a bottle!
Thomas Grant, c1890. A flyer advertising Maidstone Gin; about A6 size.
