I have a need to save other people's histories.  At the auction I go to there are often boxes of photographs, letters, diaries, bills of sale, dried corsages, ribbons from contests, programs from plays, old dance cards, graduation notices, postcards, report cards.  This falls under the category of "epehmera" and is often discarded as having no resale value by the antique dealers who have bigger fish to fry. 

Vintage clothing  I suppose could be seen as a kind of fabric ephemera, telling a visual and sometimes olfactory history of the owner.  We see the sweat under the arms of a wedding dress and the tear on the hem of a party gown as evidence of stress or hurrying down a staircase after having too much to drink.  We smell the cigarette odor of a smoker, we find the ticket stub in the old purse.
 But it's the actual physical archive of a family's history written down in black and white or printed in kodachrome that fascinates me and I save it, because if I didn't snatch it up  the bulldozer that comes at the end of the auction will plow it down and take it to the dump where it will be lost forever.
"That's sad, to have your family photos end up like this" the dealers say as they sift through the birthdays, the weddings, the proms, the proud new home owners in front of their brick house, the beach photos of women in the twenties in their wool bathing suits, showing more skin than was probably ever seen before in history and looking sheepishly pleased about it. 
The men in their boater hats with their school pennants.  The children in white dresses and ringlets posing with the family cat.  The color group school photos with the name of the teacher and the year, the platform shoes and bellbottoms, the tee shirts with their timely logos.  That is the thing about ephemera. You can criss cross through the twentieth century with one family from great grandmother to the present day, you can trace the resemblence in the faces, you can see their embarassing bare bottomed baby pictures and the same person in a formal graduation shot with their serious picture in the yearbook and their accomplishments beside them. 

You can read their letters to their mother from college asking for money. You can read their journals describing all of the movies that came out in the year 1947 and rated from good to excellent.  You can go to Paris with a teenager in 1926 and shop for hats with her and talk with her father who comes to pay her bills and have what she calls "a talk fest."  You can read between the lines when a lawyer in 1882 says that he enjoyed a lady's company "very much" and was annoyed when his coworker made him go back to the office.  You can read the story of a single mother in New Jersey in the 30's written by her depressed mother she takes care of, citing the weather every single day and the laundry that she did, meals that she cooked, worries that she had regarding her granddaughter who was having trouble at school and was home sick often.

The journals are often dull and badly written, rarely do they show any literary merit or anything earth shatteringly novel. Rather they are the real record of lives lived, dutifully recorded on paper with a pen, and the fact that they are able to reach out to the present and connect with me, a total stranger in a different century, fascinates me. 

With the internet you can do a cursory search and find out who the people were, if there are names with the ephemera. Often it is just boxes of photographs or albums with first names only so you can only surmise- upper class family from Philadelphia judging by the photographer's studio name on the formal portrait.  Upper class couple in New York City getting married at the Waldorf Astoria in 1945, old movie camera film transformed to silent video cassette, the richness of the guest's hats and dresses breathtaking, the food that they are eating and the utensils they use of the highest cost and quality. You can even read their lips to see what they are saying if you are good at that kind of thing.   One of my favorites was a stick in snap shot album from the 80's , definitely Baltimore or a suburb of, the girls wearing the permed hair and pouffy prom dresses of the time, the boys with their mullets and beer cans clowning for the camera. One girl went to three proms and had three different dresses, each a more magnified pastel powder puff than the last, one with a matching parasol.  Who is she now? Is she my age, a young grandmother at a crab feast in Ocean City? Is she a single woman living with cats in New York City writing a book on middle age angst?  Is she even alive still, and if so , what would she think about me and my friends looking at this album academically, seeing it as a prime example of horrible 80's fashion?

What I see again and again is  a paradox, a metaphysical one.  Nothing stays the same.  People are born, age, die.  Their lives , no matter how grand or how humble , leave a paper trail that leads us to the fact that they are gone, and they once were here.  Yet the business of antiques and ephemera is a curious way of entering the lives of these people on an almost alarmingly personal level and seeing who they were, what they wore, where they lived, and if you are lucky, what they felt and thought.  All very similar yet all completely unique.  Why are we alive if all we do is leave paper behind that means nothing to anyone but our family, who obviously didn't care enough to save it if it passes in to the hands of strangers like me?  And what should I do with the crates of photos, letters, journals, programs, that I have accumulated over fourteen years in this business- too much to archive, too heartbreaking to consign to the dustbin of history.

Faulker wrote something to the effect that the past isn't dead, it isn't even past.  It is oddly ephemeral, yet never disposed of entirely.  That's why I will continue my collecting, in the hopes that someday someone who comes across my paper trail will at least give it a look and know that I was alive.