With the arrival of May Day, it seemed to me a natural thing to go exploring in our so-called “Bloom Ephemera” collection. To do so is to experience almost pure randomness and happenstance.
Full-page back cover art work in Real Free Press Illustratie, no. 1, Antwerp, Belgium (undated).
The collection, consisting of 88 record cartons, is an unsorted amalgamation of printed matter from the 1960s and 1970s, almost all of which from a left-wing/counterculture perspective. It is the unprocessed counterpart to our Marshall Bloom Alternative Press Collection, which came to us through the late Marshall Bloom ’66, who co-founded Liberation News Service in 1967 to supply news stories to the thousands of “underground” alternative newspapers springing up all over the country.
What I discovered in my exploration of the Bloom Ephemera is that it really does not really consist of “ephemera” at all — at least not as traditionally defined as “paper items (as posters, broadsides, and tickets) that were originally meant to be discarded after use but have since become collectibles” (Merriam-Webster). It consists, in fact, chiefly of periodicals — and while periodicals (magazines, newspapers, newsletters, etc.) have a limited active life and might in that sense be considered somewhat ephemeral, they are regular publications that libraries, for example, systematically retain (as opposed to handbills and ticket stubs, which they do not).
Cover of the Fall 1968 issue of Caw! published by Students for a Democratic Society. This special issue addressed the May 1968 Events in France.
Some of the magazines here, I’m sure, are duplicates of those found in the Bloom Alternative Press Collection. Some are fairly mainstream popular magazines (e.g., Commonweal, Ramparts) that don’t closely fit the definition of “alternative.” But much else is wonderfully obscure and one-of-a-kind: newsletters put out by tiny leftist organizations, press releases, zines, local free newsweeklies, and so on. (more…)
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The Consecrated Eminence 