Half Full

Ed Arno Archive (see below)


Poor old Hartford. Poor old Papermania. I just don’t know what to think about them anymore.








Traditionally the first and strongest ephemera show of each New Year, Papermania been ticking along since the 1980s. I’ve been doing it for twenty years or so. It took me at least ten years to figure out what “paper” even was, but I got my mind around the concept just in time. The Internet killed books, and ephemera took off. Ephemera was fun! Visual, visceral, and almost always unique, or close to it.


I eat breakfast every morning during the show at Papa’s, a little joint across from the train station.

Jane, the waitress, is a prodigy. She remembers every customer from the year before, and she remembers every order – “Two over easy, hash browns, tomato juice, coffee and wheat toast, right?” I ask her how it’s going. She says, “Hartford is dying.”

Maybe it is. I walk back from breakfast and all down the main drag I see big plate glass windows full of emptiness. Realtor’s signs trolling for tenants. Mc freaking Donald’s has shut down for lack of business.
The lovely old Goodwin Hotel is shuttered.Even the bums have left.

My worries are not lessened on the floor during setup at the show. We’re missing half a dozen dealers, with only a couple of newbies to replace them. There doesn’t seem to be much to buy unless I want first issue TV Guides, a zillion postcards, or tired $300 political broadsides priced at $750. Oh, and don’t forget two zillion snapshots. Vernacular photography. The new rage. The other new rage is to just dump them in your booth and let the buyer do the work of sorting and picking.

Sometimes it feels as if Papermania is on its way to becoming Toiletpapermania.

But then I find a cache of seventy-three letters from an American merchant in China to his girlfriend, 1860s, in the booth of Tom Stanford, who’s been missing so long I thought he was dead. But he wasn’t dead. He was pursuing his career as an artist and gallery owner, and covering half his body with eye-popping tattoos. And now he’s back. Salut, Tom!

Then an unrecorded shipwreck account, illustrated, eight pages long, imposed on its original folio sheet, folded, but uncut. A 1753 chart of the New England coastline I’ve never seen before, and the final terrific piece – out of my field, but who could resist? – an archive of one thousand original cartoons for the New Yorker and Playboy, along with ten New Yorker cover designs in color, a sheaf of correspondence, and an idea file of five hundred punch lines, prior to their illustrations, on file cards, by the great Peter Arno. A dealer is offering each item in the collection individually, but it occurs to my pal Lin Respess that some enterprising bookseller might buy the whole lot, as an archive. Which we do, at considerable expense.

Only to realize, after we’ve coughed up the dough, that the artist was Ed Arno, not Peter Arno. I point this out to Lin and he replies, “Who cares? They’re great!” A half full guy, if ever there was one. Coincidentally, colleague Rich West of Periodyssey, comes up to me right after this and thanks me for providing, in my blog, a corrective to his “perennially half-full mindset.” Jeepers. I didn’t think my blog entries were that bleak! Anyway, the Arno cartoons ARE great.

Then the show opens and the crowd is as large and hungry as it’s ever been. People fill booths, heads bent, muttering quietly, like monks at prayer.

And I wonder what I was worried about. We’ve come through another year. And we’re back in Hartford, under that same lovely bad lighting, in a paradise of paper, and all is as it should be.

Rich West’s glass is half full, and mine is… far from empty.


(Just FYI, the Arno archive is $22,500. And don't forget to check our website at http://tenpound.com/ for Maritime List #208 - "Wet Paper." This is a catalog devoted solely to maritime ephemera. No books!)