Ephemera Archive

The Bodleian Library joined forces with ProQuest to start an electronic ephemera project to digitise over 65,000 items of the Bodleian Library's John Johnson ephemera collection. Ephemera collections provide a glimpse into daily life and are valuable resources to social and family historians. Born John de Monins Johnson in 1882, Johnson was a printer at Oxford University Press and the majority of his collection contains items published in Britain from the eighteenth through to the twentieth century. There are some items dating back to 1508. John Johnson was noted to have described printed ephemera: "Everything which would ordinarily go into the waste paper basket after use, everything printed which is not actually a book..."





You can find out more about the collection by watching the video of an interview with Peter White, ProQuest's Project Manager and David Tomkins, Project Manager of the Bodleian Library. (video from http://utube.com)

The project's website at http://johnjohnson.chadwyck.co.uk/marketing/about.jsp provides an introduction to the collection. Also at http://johnjohnson.wordpress.com/ is the Curator's choice: selections from the John Johnson Collection.