Join us in Booth 308 at the ESA Fair this weekend in Greenwich, CT  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏

Join us in Booth 308 at the Ephemera Society Fair!

This weekend will find us in the southwest...of New England. We'll spend a fleeting moment in Greenwich, Connecticut at the Ephemera Society Fair, with a range of our specializations represented in everything but books. In play will be a miniature parlor game from around 1800 that functions much like Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity. Woven in, too, will be Froebel albums, including an example from World War I-era Belgium, with an embroidered page honoring the royal family. Subtle subversion occurs in a three-volume set of unrecorded French Resistance coloring books. In contrast, a looming cloud of Edward Gorey paper, including Fantod packs in their envelopes and a plethora of posters, will cast a mischievous shadow over the booth.

Catch these highlights and more before they're gone during the fair's public hours at the Hyatt Regency on Saturday from 10:00am to 5:00pm and on Sunday from 11:00am to 4:00pm.

We hope to see you there,

P. S. & Co. Rare Books
 

Highlights

Frag und Antwort [Question & Answer]

(c. 1800)

110 cards, all printed letterpress at recto and backed in contemporary decorated paper at verso. The set provides the materials for a parlor game, setting up something akin to speed dating for young adults. A later, but not much later, owner realized the set's potential as a jigsaw puzzle, and the versos of the cards can be re-assembled into a complete sheet. Cards held in original box with title in manuscript to heart-shaped paper label at lid. Learn more...

Amusement in the Zoological Garden. A New Tetotum Game for the Amusement of Youth

London: E. Wallis, (n.d.)

Single sheet game board, with twenty-eight demarcated spaces. Twenty-two of these feature hand-colored engravings showing different parts of a zoo, with each animal in its own habitat. The remaining six spaces provide special directions, quizzing the player on a few of the animals, and explaining the consequences of success or failure. A rare game known only in a single copy. Learn more...

Froebel album

(Belgium, 1917)

An enormous compilation of Froebel exercises, encompassing nearly all the Froebel gifts applicable in two dimensions. The French language dominates the captions, but one example of paper weaving shows the lion rampant of Belgium, and another bears the photographs of the Belgian royal family, King Albert, Queen Elisabeth, and their children. Exceptional is the album's completeness, care, and range of materials given its Great War context. Learn more...

Oog en Hand: Moderne Teekenmethode voor de Lagere School

Zwijndrecht: Wed. Plancken & Zoon, 1931

Two quarto-sized folders, one containing 20 cards; the second with 19.These sets of geometric images represent the first stages of a larger curriculum in modern visual design emphasizing the total objectivity of basic shapes and colors in the interest of marrying aesthetic purity and industrial utility. The target audience was elementary school students between four and eleven or twelve years old. Learn more...

The Children's Scrap-book

London: Darton & Co., (c. 1850)

Each sheet sports chromolithographs, which the young reader would presumably cut out and re-paste elsewhere, into a more personal configuration. The volume opens with a portrait of the royal family, with Victoria and Albert presiding over six of their children, and hence the dating of the edition to about 1850, when their seventh child, Arthur, was born. Unrecorded in OCLC and unknown to the Darton bibliography. Learn more...

Children's Newspaper. Album of Lifelike Pictures

London: Children's Newspaper, 1933

Each page sports at least one anaglyphic, 3D photograph. Subjects range from downtown Manhattan "as seen from an aeroplane," to the ruins of a Roman arch in Andalusia, to musicians in Java. Gathered together, the images present a view to the world through the (literal) lens of technology. Cardboard glasses still present. Learn more...

Programme of the Theatrical Garden Party

London, 1938

The benefit party assembled a who's who of the British theatrical and film scene, with the 54 events emceed by Noel Coward. This souvenir program was signed by George Arliss, Conrad Veidt, Charles Laughton, Sydney Howard, and Robertson Hare. Bound in wrappers with upper cover illustrated by G. M. Wright. Learn more...

"Democratic Vistas," by Walt Whitman. Illustrated by Antonio Frasconi

(1960)

One of 300 copies. Signed by the artist. Frasconi's woodcut portrait of Whitman is set above an excerpt from the latter's "Democratic Vistas" of 1871. The woodcut likewise appears in Frasconi's A Whitman Portrait. Learn more...

The Singer Mfg. Co. Costumes of All Nations

NY: J. Ottmann Lith. Co., 1893

Complete set of 33 chromolithographed cards issued by the Singer Manufacturing Corporation as a marketing souvenir for the World's Columbian Exposition. The copy on the included original box indicates that the images are in fact reproductions of photographs taken on location, then supposedly colored on the spot in order to "correctly represent the native costumes," piggybacking on photography's scientific value as an indexical process. Learn more...

Three Books from the Fantod Press (IV), by Edward Gorey

N.p.: Fantod Press, 1973

One of 500 sets. Each book signed by Gorey. First edition. A set of three books: The Disrespectful Summons, The Abandoned Sock, and The Lost Lions. Fine in envelope, which shows toning and wear. Learn more...

La Resistance I, II, and III

Paris: Editions Perfrac, (c. 1946)

Three octavo volumes that together encourage the young colorist to follow the color arrangements provided on the facing page; these images are humorous but altogether provocative, narrating in alternately snide and sincere overtures the efforts of the Resistance operating in Vichy France. Those efforts include printing ration cards, vandalizing walls, capturing German and Vichy troops, and using an effigy of Hitler for target practice. The Free French flag pops up throughout and with increasing regularity and visibility as the scenes progress, culminating in a celebration of victory and the conclusion of the war. Learn more...

The Smashed Up Locomotive. A Mechanical Puzzle for Boys

Springfield, MA: Milton Bradley & Co., (c. 1880)

56 jigsaw pieces which assemble to show a chromolithograph of a train, with all features labeled. Certainly its attention to functional and mechanical detail suggests that it was intended to harness a child's fascination with trains into concrete knowledge; and the fascination was timely, since upon publication of the puzzle the first American transcontinental railroad had been completed only a decade prior. This is Milton Bradley's first edition of the puzzle: later issuances were housed in cardboard boxes, rather than the present wooden one. Learn more...
 
Philip Salmon & Company Rare Books
607 Boylston Street
Boston, MA 02116
617-247-2818
Philip Salmon & Company Rare Books
607 Boylston Street
Boston, MA 02116