An occasional newsletter of found imagery & ephemera from Elizabeth Goodspeed.
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I’ve always had a soft spot for design made by non-designers. When I tell people this, they usually think I’m talking about punk flyers, or the kind of sweetly naive drawings of fruit that one might find in a church cookbook. While I do love both of these things—and other things like them—this is not what I am talking about when I say “design made by non-designers.”
As a French millennial kid obsessed with the NBA who grew into a vintage design nerd, you can bet my love for pennant flags is over the top. The mere sight of an arched college block font on a tee gives me butterflies, not to mention a whole felt artifact whose only reason to exist is to celebrate something.
I’m often asked how my work as a designer, writer, archivist, and educator fit together.
Despite enjoying the look of stamps, I’ve avoided becoming a philatelist for the same reason I’ve avoided getting too into record collecting: I really do not need a reason to be buying more stuff, especially old stuff. However, I will reluctantly admit that seeing Ashley Shiyan Zhu’s stamp collection, featured here today, made me heavily reconsider that perspective.
The Justice Gazette was first published in 1909 in Istanbul to document various legal news and statistics (things like judicial inspector reports, scholarly articles, legal opinions, and translations of foreign laws). These particular graphs are from the magazine’s relaunch in Ankara during the 1920s and early 30s; following the dissolution of the long-standing Ottoman Empire in 1922, but while…
About twice a year my local library has a book sale, which is put on by a group of chatty octogenarians (plus one sprightly fifty year old who accepts Venmo). While most inventory is exactly what you’d expect—outdated Rick Steves guides, miscellaneous self-help, generous quantities of Joyce (James and Carol Oates)—occasionally there’s something unexpected, like a book of Victorian cat portraiture…
I first learned about Tyco Toys from a YouTube video on the history of Lego. Tyco Super Blocks were one of their competitors in the ’80s and the ads featured in the video boasted about their superiority. The ads didn't necessarily catch my eye, but the logotype did: An ultra bold geometric 4-letter word with 2 ligatures in it, one of them (the CO) a tiny gap shy of becoming an infinity symbol. My…
The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift was a short-lived British youth movement founded in 1920 by John Hargrave, a Utopian polymath described as an “author, cartoonist, inventor, lexicographer, artist and psychic healer.” A former Boy Scout leader himself, Hargrave had grown frustrated with the group—founded in 1907 by Lieutenant General Robert Baden-Powell to drill discipline and patriotism into young…
Like so many past ephemera finds I’ve shared here, I bought these midcentury North American restaurant placemats at Brimfield Flea this July from a vendor who had around 500 in a big plastic tub. I bought 25 for $75 (a steal!) but I did have to talk myself out of asking how much it would be for the whole box. Most of these date from the late 1940s through the ’50s, when the postwar boom and…
Sinclair Programs was a short-lived magazine published between 1982 and 1985 for users of Sinclair Research’s line of home computers.
This fall, I spent several afternoons exploring the archives of the Museum of Living History in the suburbs of Paris, searching for typographic inspiration related to French political history.
While missionaries had been traveling to China for over a century by the time Christian propaganda posters like these first appeared (the first Protestant missionary, Robert Morrison, arrived in 1807), during the Republican era from 1911–1949, the country’s fractured leadership and ideological clashes created an especially ripe opportunity for missionaries to spread their message before another…
As an avid music fan and devoted admirer of typography and graphic design, I began making Tickets Please in March 2023 after walking by a concert hall and noticing people simply displaying a QR code on their phones to enter the show. I was taken back to my youth, and how I used to cherish and save each concert ticket for the various shows I attended. Serendipitously, I had recently reconnected…
I’m a big fan of Letterform Archive in San Francisco, so when I saw their announcement about a newly donated collection of chopstick sleeves, I knew I had to share it here, too!
There was a set of these Works Progress Administration (WPA) posters hanging in my childhood home, but they somehow never registered as “ephemera” to me until recently, when my sister bought a new one for my dad (Asiatic Plate No. 39: Chinese Nobility) as a Christmas gift. This naturally led me down a rabbit hole of municipal library websites to try and find more entries in the series. Though the…
I found these Belgian pharmaceutical labels at Brimfield Flea Market in Massachusetts, where three times a year I buy a myriad of old things I almost definitely don’t need (this summer's haul included a tramp art letter holder, a dozen copies of 1970s
About a year and a half ago, I purchased my first instructional vinyl box set at Academy Records on 18th St in Manhattan. Titled Night Moves: The Professional Approach to Disco Dance Instruction, the box set came with a 95 page booklet on various dance moves.
Today’s collection is a series of magazine subscription cards from the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
Today we have a guest issue from Janet Delavan, a recent graduate of Parsons School of Design who specializes in book design and printed matter. Her recent senior thesis, The Feminine American Pastime, was inspired by her interest in the history of women and cue sports, and features a series of books which juxtapose “women’s work” with “the man’s game.” Here, she shares some fun billiards ephemera…
Before telephones were widespread, telegrams were the fastest form of communication—and therefore mostly used to share unfortunate news like deaths or illnesses. In the 1930s, telegram usage declined due to the rise of telephones and increased postal service efficiency, so the Post Office sought to enhance their appeal. Greetings Telegrams, a new style of decorative telegram they created in…
