1894 Benjamin Franklin Almanac
Today’s item of the day is a which is up for bid on eBay. It has BIN price of just $129.00
The seller tells us this: One of 144 copies of the first and more elaborate of the two books (plus one pamphlet) produced by the book collecting club The Duodecimos in the late 19th Century. The Duodecimos was an exclusive club numbering 12 members, among them printer Francis Wilson, collector Paul Lemperly, publishers W. Irving Way and Herbert Stone and author Eugene Field. For this facsimile of the only surviving copy of Franklin’s first almanac, no expense was spared. The Club members acquired various journals, diaries and other 18th Century blank paper, so the facsimile portion would be printed on actual paper of the time. The printing of the facsimile was done at the De Vinne Press, using an old oak hand press and other 18th Century printing techniques. (12 copies, one for each member, were printed on vellum). For the introductory pages they had special hand-made paper bearing the Club’s watermark manufactured, and had cast a new reproduction of an 18th Century font. The book is illustrated with 14 portraits of Franklin, mostly collotypes mounted on hinges bound in to the book, but with the frontispiece being an original pencil signed etching by Thomas Johnson from a pastel then owned by John Bigelow of New York, who wrote the introduction to this volume.
If you are interested in owning this outstanding piece of Ephemera, click the link above and place your winning bid.
I’m Tom Murphy and thanks for helping me give Ephemera the Encore it deserves.
Have a look at my Ephemera store
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Technorati tags: Benjamin Franklin, Almanac, Duodecimos, Ephemera
entitled Hofmekler’s Gallery on the cover of which was a cartoon caricature of Lee Iococca. Some of his other famous ones are Bill Clinton and Pat Robertson who ran for President of the United States.
This is just one of the items in that collection. It’s Muskie’s “Honorary Membership” card in the Franklin County Fish and Game Association from 1956. Over the next few weeks we will attempt to highlight some of the other items… which at the moment seem a bit difficult to sort through. It’s troubling to note that their website says that “Over the past few years, an effort has been underway to reduce the amount of non-historically significant material in the Edmund S. Muskie papers.” Let’s hope they don’t just put them in the trash bin.
For Presidents Day, let me direct you to yet another Flickr collection, this time by a lady named Suzee Que and entitled as above, Vintage Patriotic Ephemera. This collection is not quite as large, in fact it only has 12 items, but each is quite lovely, and old.
Perhaps my favorite is the one on the right entitled “Three cheers for the Red, White and Blue”.
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