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June is always the month when I start whining about how busy I am. No time to stop and smell the roses (which, appropriately, are blooming away in my yard) and no time to finish all the projects I've started. School's winding down and summer's calling. I've got some exciting picking trips planned and so much to take care of before I can hit the road.

I recently became familiar with the book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life by Scott Adams of Dilbert fame. In the book, Adams makes some obvious but insightful distinctions between simplifiers (who, well, make simple plans) and optimizers (who are always trying to squeeze one more thing in to their brilliant plans, but have to accept a higher level of stress in exchange).

Adams decribes himself and his wife as follows:

“In about an hour, the optimizer in the family will return home from whatever she is optimizing and potentially introduce several changes to my plan.  If the changes work, our evening will be even better than I imagined, or perhaps more productive.  That’s great!  But the changes will also introduce new opportunities for things to go wrong.  This balance works well for Shelly because she has nerves of steel.  I’m more like a squirrel that wandered into a monster-truck rally.  I don’t have the constitution to optimize.”

Not surprisingly, when it comes to stuff, I am also trying to squeeze one more thing in. More is better for those of us with a restless eye. Here are some interiors that exemplify maximalist decorating, that I particularly enjoy- mostly culled from Design Sponge and The Selby blogs.

 

 

I am also drawn to individual objects with a whole lot going on. I've been putting together some new Etsy listings and was noticing how some of the maps, in particular, are quite busy in their designs. The antique French maps, below, from the 1880s, are just brimming with cartouches, vignettes, hand-coloring and extremely ornate fonts. The cartographers got a little carried away…love it!

 

 

 

 

I am taking my show on the road next week. I'll be selling at the vast Brimfield Antiques Show in Brimfield, MA from Tuesday May 10th through Saturday May 14th (inventory and weather-permitting).

I'll be set up at the centrally located Brimfield Barn.

I will also be selling these cute, original pictorial maps of the show.

I'm bringing some great and rare items to the show- including advertising, hand-colored maps & prints, signs & apothecary.

 

Hope to see you there.

Our Brooklyn shop will be open, but NOT on Thursday May 12th.

I've got games on the brain lately….and on the walls of my shop.

I have always LOVED game boards- the catchy graphics, wit and art. I often find them in broken boxes and missing many of their playing pieces. Among my favorites from my collection (seen hanging above) is the very large four-part "Uncle Sam's Mail" from 1893.

Apparently, I am not the only one that appreciates this category of ephemera. There is a current exhibit at The Grolier Club in Manhattan called "The Royal Game of The Goose: Four Hundred Years of Printed Board Games". I plan on making the trip this spring to see it before it leaves on May 14th. Here are some images from the exhibit.

After reading about the Grolier Club's exhibit, I realized an interesting connection. Several years ago, I bought a collection of unused old game board prints from Paris. The game maker was the Saussine Company. The second example above (from the exhibit) was also from this company. I have several examples of these game prints for sale from the early, early 1900s. They are just the unmounted, unused chromolithographic prints- suitable for framing. Inquire for pricing and availability. The graphics are pretty spectacular on these.

As far as decorating with these beauties goes, it couldn't be easier to just hang the mounted boards up with some large bull-nosed clips across the folds in the boards. I snapped some photos of a few framed boards for sale at the West Elm Marketplace in DUMBO. These were behind glass and rather pricey but it was fun to see them appreciated.

Others have done some great decorating with vintage game boards. They can suit many different styles and eras as they reflect the times in which they were made. Some folks hang the colorful box tops too. Go nuts!

 

Slogging through February can be tough- even in a milder winter such as this one. I'd been feeling rather uninspired and groggy this month. Fortunately, my friend Aya Nihei, brought me a copy of her recently published book A to Z: Encyclopedia of Ephemera and Paper from New York. It was like a ray of sunshine cutting through the drear.

Back in the fall, Aya spent many hours in my shop sifting through my (embarrassingly huge) collection of ephemera- asking questions and sorting it into categories. It was fascinating to see what pieces interested her and what she ultimately chose for her project.

Aya, an avid flea marketer, foodie and connoisseur of Brooklyn, is from Japan. She writes books and a blog (Best of Brooklyn) about New York for the Japanese market. She has been coming to my booth at the Brooklyn Flea for years now. Before this book, she put together one on vintage and commercial glass (i.e. mason jars)- finding many in my booth. She brings her finds back to Japan and holds a pop-up shop to sell them and to promote her books.

Last fall, when she e-mailed me about her latest project, she had a list of types of paper and ephemera that she was looking for and wondered if I had any of these items. My reply was "How much time do you have? Because I pretty much have it all". So, over several days, I pulled out bin after bin of labels, targets, pamphlets, postcards, matchbooks, etc….

The coolest thing about the experience was that I fell in love all over again with all of my paper. It is so much fun to see it all beautifully arranged and cataloged in Aya's lovely book.

While the book was made for the Japanese market, you can purchase it in NYC at the Kinokuniya book store in Bryant Park. You can buy many other fun things at Kinokuniya. It is one of my favorite places to buy gifts. My daughter has a vast collection of impossibly cute Japanese puzzle erasers. So, there you have a bit of cultural exchange.

 

 

 

I've been giving a lot of thought, these days, to marketing and social media. While I love, the visual feast that is Instagram, I'm still quite old-fashioned, with a weakness for paper and ink. Victorian trade cards (state of the art business marketing tools back in the day) are one of my favorite categories of ephemera- the graphics, wit and vivid colors are captivating. I have some amazing examples in my collection.

That said, don't neglect to follow my Instagram account for daily posts and first dibs on new merchandise. You can now purchase items (any items with a listed price) directly…pretty nifty…almost as cool as…trade cards?

 

Trade cards originated in England in the 1700s with tradesmen advertising their wares. But the advent of lithography in the 1870s made it possible to mass-produce them in color, leading to a golden age from 1876 to the early 1900s when halftone printed newspaper and magazine ads became more economical.

Trade cards typically had a picture on one side and an ad on the other. Some of my personal favorites were produced by the Soapine soap company of RI. Their cards were so clever and charming- especially the reoccurring theme of washing the whale with the caption "Soapine DID IT". Adorable.

For more on Soapine and their trade cards, you can read this article Whale Washing by the Ephemera Society.

Some other examples of trade card-like advertising were quite elaborate. Some companies produced collectible series, such as Arbuckle Coffee's state cards.

Or fancy die-cut cards

Still other companies produced lavishly illustrated pamphlets as a premium to their customers, such as Chase and Sanborn's lovely North American Birds.

Or the cute Seven Barks health tonic- the cover is pictured below, but the booklet also contained entertaining stories.