Paper Trails #11: Lost & Found—The Strange Afterlives of Things Never Meant to Last

If you’ve spent any time digging through boxes of ephemera (guilty), you know there’s always that one item that makes you stop and think: How on earth did this survive? A flimsy handbill for a 1972 feminist consciousness-raising meeting. A matchbook from a long-gone gay bar. A crumpled flyer advertising a punk show that definitely violated several fire codes. A menu from a coffeehouse where poets once held court until closing.

These pieces were meant to be used, pocketed, ignored, trashed. And yet here they are—tiny ambassadors from the past, insisting on being remembered.

Ephemera is the paperwork of everyday life, but its survival is anything but everyday. A political leaflet might have sparked an argument on a street corner before being stuffed into someone’s coat. A postcard sent from a Greyhound station might have lived on a refrigerator until the magnet gave out. A scrap of paper shoved into a book might have hibernated for fifty years before falling, dramatically, onto my table during cataloguing.

The beauty of ephemera is that it tells the truth about real lives—the ones that don’t make it into history textbooks. You can read social movements through their pamphlets, nightlife through its matchbooks, music through its handbills, and heartbreak through its postcards. Each piece whispers: This mattered to someone, once.

Even better? Ephemera refuses to behave. It slips between categories. It won’t sit politely on a bookshelf. It lives in boxes, drawers, envelopes, shoeboxes, glove compartments. And when it resurfaces, it does so with attitude. A Black Power poster shoved behind a filing cabinet. A flyer for a drag show tucked inside a cookbook. A protest handbill folded into a wallet that belonged to someone who never marched—but kept the paper anyway.

Archivists and collectors know this: ephemera is accidental history. We don’t save these things because we think they’ll matter—we save them because, somehow, they already do. When a university special collections library acquires a box of flyers, they aren’t just buying paper. They’re preserving scenes, subcultures, neighborhoods, movements, mischief, and memory.

And every once in a while, a single fragile piece can change the story. A forgotten invitation. A tattered schedule. A photograph scribbled with a name you’ve never heard. Suddenly, a whole lost world opens up.

So here’s to the things that were never meant to last—and to the glorious, improbable fact that they did. Ephemera teaches us that history isn’t only written by the winners. Sometimes it’s written by whoever had a pen, a printer, and a pocket.

Tomberg Rare Books, LLC