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It’s a bit of a contradiction, really. By strict definition, ephemera is fleeting. It is transitory written and printed material that is not intended to be kept. Indeed, harking back to the word's Greek root, it is literally something not meant to be kept for longer than a day. But keep it, do we ever. It seems the thirst for these fleeting fragments of times gone by is something that is rapidly growing in today's world. And it’s entirely possible that it is the transitory, throw away nature of this material that makes us love it so. Spontaneously scribbled mementoes, while worthless to the person who wrote them and the time that they were written in, can be treasures more valuable than diamonds to someone discovering them years later. Something as simple as a shopping list can offer us a glimpse into a time that no longer exists, a kind of voyeurism into lives and times whose only remnants are these haphazard pieces of paper.
A love of ephemera can be seen, in its own right, as a way of valuing the everyday. Whether we wonder at a bus timetable we used last year or relish a love letter written by long-gone relatives a hundred years ago, we are stopping and taking pleasure in the simple universality of the human experience. We are celebrating the fact that the smallest actions we do and the overlooked items that we encounter everyday might one day be something which others will marvel at.
We live in a world that is predominately fast-paced and computerized. We send messages, but they’re often not handwritten on a piece paper that could potentially be picked up from a crack in a skirting board by a generation fifty years from now. But the flipside of this fast, computerized world is that we now have greater access to the appreciation and the perpetuation of the fine tradition of ephemera. Just google ephemera and you’ll find hundreds of pages jam-packed full of wonderful stuff – the Ephemera Society of America’s website (www.ephemerasociety.org) is a great place to start.
People love it, and want to become a part of traditions that were once taken for granted as everyday practice but now have a magical quality through their nostalgia and sentimentality. Jumping Tangents itself is testament to this very urge – just take a look at our vintage wrap, with its brown paper and old-style postage stamps and you’ll see what I mean. In a sense, it’s valued even more now that it’s no longer so common place. How often do you receive handwritten letters in the post? And how excited are you when you get one?
Here I feel compelled to relate an interesting discovery Cathie made a week or so ago in the pages of Love and the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This fabulous book absolutely encompasses the wonder of the handwritten, wax-sealed letter that I’ve been discussing. It’s a celebration of the sentiments that handwritten letters contain and the magical, time-conquering consequences that they can have – especially in the exchange of love letters. While reading about one of the main characters, Dr Urbino, courting the alluring Fermina Daza with a gentle bombardment of love letters, Cathie came across the sentence: “Three more letters arrived with the last rains of October, the first of them accompanied by a little box of violet pastilles from Flavigny Abbey”. These are only the very violet pastilles that we stock at Jumping Tangents, and what an affirmation of their magical quality as an accompaniment to the letters and parcels you send your loved ones!
And what better way to re-introduce the joy of letter writing into your life than by having the real-deal tools to do it with? J. Herbin, whose inks, papers and quills we stock, have been servicing the trade of writing in style since 1670 and are the oldest name in ink production in the world. The original M. Herbin was a sailor who brought formulas for manufacturing sealing wax back from India to Paris, on his many journeys between the two places. J. Herbin products have been used during the past three hundred years by Louis XIV King of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, Victor Hugo, and now their sealing wax embellishes bottles of Coco Chanel perfume. The wax is still poured by hand, and removed from its steel molds while still warm. It’s the history behind the use of the wax that makes it all the more intoxicatingly exciting to use – you feel that, as you stamp a fine envelope down with wax and your own seal, you are taking part in a ritual that has involved hundreds of people for hundreds of years.
Writing a letter is more than the words that you use – it is the whole process. Beautiful stationery, the deliberate strokes of the quill, sumptuous sealing wax, and a comfortingly weighty seal are all part of the enjoyment. These things make the letter a gift to the writer as much as it is to the recipient. And, who knows, what you write may one day become treasured ephemera to someone else.
By Kimberley Davis, BA(Hons I)
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