The charm of local ephemera
Ephemera - items that were made for brief and fleeting purposes and never intended to last a long time - has always interested me. Perhaps it comes from working at a newspaper, where the product you work hard all day to create becomes, famously, tomorrow's budgie cage liner or chip wrapper. Is it the tiny glimpses ephemeral items give of times and places distant or lost? Or is it the design effort that went into making them appealing to the eye of buyers or users? Probably both, plus an element of compulsion in the personality: the…
