Ephemera – Making Money with Paper

Why collect old paper? I hear this question a lot when I tell people that I’m interested in ephemera. For those unfamiliar, ephemera auctions in Arkansas is commonly defined as transitory written and printed matter that was produced for short-term uses-not intended to be retained or preserved.

Historical Research

Writers and historians use ephemera for deep investigation into companies, persons, and goods. And many genealogists find it to be indispensable in their work. Paper ephemera auctions are housed at many universities, libraries, and museums specifically for its value in academic and scholarly research. Some of the greatest widespread items that amasses categories as Ephemera are bank checks, baseball cards, bill heads, bonds, brochures, business cards, calendars, cigar box labels & bands, greeting cards, invitations, labels, letters, magazines, maps, newspapers, pamphlets, paper dolls, passes, photographs, postcards, posters, stamps, posters, programs, sheet music, stocks, tickets, timetables, trade cards, trade catalogues and vintage valentines. Some types of Ephemera such as bill heads, postcards and trade cards have been appreciated for years. In fact vintage postcard collecting has been around for a very long time and is still very popular today.

Decorative

People hang framed ephemera, such as antique posters, advertisements, lingo photography, atrium cards, etc., on the walls of their homes and workplaces. Collectible paper can be a chat piece or the pivotal point of a room. A very popular area of collecting is saving antique and vintage paper materials. Now you might think that this would only include famous documents or photographs. Those certainly do get collected, but there is also a ton of stuff being sold on places like auctions. This old paper “stuff” is often referred to as ephemera. Ephemera are made up of common, everyday items that are no longer available anymore. Old advertising, magazine ads, vintage labels and even wrappers from some products get collected by people for a variety of reasons.

Artist’s Raw Material

Many profitable and fine performers use ephemera as the code source of raw material in their work. Some well-known collage artists, for example, use old paper as a code element. Profitable artists occasionally use ephemera in print, broadcast, and outdoor advertising. Amateur artists use it to produce a variety of crafts, and book fans use ephemera to adorn the pages of their albums. Of course, there are just as numerous or more fanciful motives to collect ephemera: it may repeat you of a past involvement, job, or loved one; it may be collectible for its own sake or, it may add value or interest to an existing collection of other collectible objects.

Check the Address

One of the more difficult aspects of ephemera collecting is judging the age of a piece of undated paper. It’s calm to regulate the age of a traditional document that has a date evidently published on it. Though, when a date isn’t present, it wages to know a few trickeries to support judge its age. Here are three tricks to bumpily evaluating the age of undated paper.

Reasons for collecting these old items are as varied as the collectors themselves. Some of the old ephemera are purchased by people who use it in art work. Some is just purchased to be admired as it brings back memories of a time gone by. Whatever the reason, the market is real. If you have boxes of old items tucked away in some dusty corner, you might just have yourself some buried treasure that someone would like to add to their collection. You can get the quality products at lowest cost directly from ephemera auctions in Arkansas.