Various Ephemera

I'm a bit bored and am photographing some stuff. 1st off is an vintage information booklet from the Christ Hospital of Cincinnati, Ohio. Not sure exactly how old it is.

 

Some more misc. ephemera I got a few years back in a lot. Nothing groundbreaking but still fun to examine.

 

The piece about pianos did say Dr Crippen....(LOL) I think if I were that guy going after a PhD I'd have changed my name!

 

Probably for parents with kids in the hospital, etc. There may not have been a hotel near-by.

 

Is there any obvious reason for the "WHY?" on the front?

 

I saw that too. Not sure.

 

Would you sell this piece by piece, Joe?

 

Not into the reselling game yet but might try it out in the future. I assume some of the lower value stuff would need to be grouped.

I got some other Marietta, Ohio/Kentucky/W. Virginia stuff in same lot: all from Ohio river towns that I expect I'd try to group into small lots.

The Christ Hospital piece would likely realize enough to sell by itself I think.

Any thoughts? Going to try to plan to get into reselling with my folks after this pandemic is over in order to diversify income streams.

 

My own interest in ephemera items was purely historic, to legally prove history. Whether it was to prove a person or place existed at a certain time, or to show how a document had been altered, these are very valuable. I don't have suggestions, I've had and tossed and garage sale-ed much of my stuff like this due to no idea how to sell it. I would like to follow this thread about it, to see what you ultimately wind up doing. Diversifying your income - this is a great time to do it!

 

The problem is - I want to find a buy-sell website that wouldn't cost a lot, so that my historic paper items could just sit there and wait for the right buyer to come along. Please let me know if you run across an ephemera website that would be very reasonably priced for the listings.

When a buyer needs to prove a court record from a piece of ephemera, it should be priced accordingly. At that point of sale - is when I would want to pay for the listing. I have some interesting items, but won't pull them out until I figure out the website to sell on and then photograph them. Suggestions welcomed.

I haven't yet looked on etsy to see if ephemera is a big seller there?

 

If you do sell it, be sure to include all the names of the people mentioned, in a way that it will get indexed by google (i.e. in text, not just the image). Among good prospects for having an interest are descendants of those people that are interested in genealogy and family history. I have ebay and heritage auction alerts set up to notify me when things related to my and my wife's distant ancestors come up (and they do, occasionally).

 

I just sold two lots like that to the same buyer this fall. He was the family genealogist and I'd listed a great-aunt's wedding photos. He then asked if I had anything else ...yep. Rescued a pile from an estate sale, including family negatives and letters. Sold it all to him cheap, because I figured it needed to go to a good home, and only a family member was really going to want it. Happy buyer, happy seller.

 

Some of my friends at my postcard club go to "paper shows" where ephemera like this apparently sells very well, even stuff like 1980's family photos and stuff you wouldn't think would have a market. There is a YouTuber called Paper and Moose whose videos I occasionally watch who is into this stuff and has done a few walkthroughs of paper shows. There are some very specialized dealers at these shows.

I imagine that most ephemera will be a hard sell until the right interested buyer ultimately comes along. I wonder if you could set up your own website that could get traffic from the search engines and would be relatively inexpensive to operate for certain "long tail items" that might take years to sell.

 

Some more ephemera showing the Lebanon Ohio fire department in a parade. By the paper used and the age of some of the other items I acquired these with I'd guess late 1970's-1980's for these photos. Again these would likely be hard to find a buyer for but a kind of neat and I got them in a bulk lot with other items I wanted so the cost basis is near zero. 16 total photos -- I only photographed the more interesting ones.

 

The Lebanon FD would love to have those if they don't have copies. Firefighters love finding pieces of the their house's history. I found a modern print of a 50s neg of a bunch of Hartford CT firefighters and their engine once. This is going back 10 years. I showed it to a neighbor who was a retired Hartford fire captain. He named all but one man; he'd served in that firehouse years later and knew most of them. That photo went home with him.

I watch her sometimes too, not so much for the ephemera but for the other pieces.