seal the deal
i’m a sucker for seals especially when they have been collected in a single book. as i have said before, my official listing with the ephemera society of america is as a collector of “collections of collections.” i just love when things of all sorts are placed carefully in a book and form a collection. this particular book has page after page of wonderful city and business seals. this is a huge area of collecting with the postal label and stamp groups but what does it for me is the book itself. old and messy, which says someone spent the time to collect these, place and number them. the numbers have no obvious reasoning or meaning to me, but they surely did for the collector. i am always thrilled when i visit a book fair and start looking at the spines and shelves. there is always a shelf with books that have no reference to them. common labels are: new york; printing; philosophy; world war two, just to name a few. i take note when a shelf is not labeled and contains books that have no particular category. i start from right to left and start pulling each book out a few inches to determine if it’s worth opening. usually they are offbeat titles but once in awhile, as with this one, there is no title on the cover and I am intrigued enough to see what’s inside. when it has a collection of some sort, i am hard pressed to contain my excitement. then, of course, comes the price. i don’t remember how much this book was. that’s a good thing that usually indicates i didn’t pay too much.
step and repeat
repetition. i love when someone has amassed a collection of a particular item and pasted it down in a book. in this case, it’s cigar bands. i’m not usually attracted to tobacciana but I find that I have several such collections: matchbox labels, old cigarette packaging. this wonderful album of cigar bands was collected by hazel wagner and is dated october 30, 1907. there are 30 pages of wonderful examples, many using stone lithography and lots of gold, which seems to the main requirement. my father smoked cigars and whenever i smell a cigar i think of him. however i never saved or collected the bands. frankly, they weren’t as nice as these. i believe there used to be the international seal, label and cigar band society but i could not find it. i didn’t try too hard except for the quick google search but I did locate the cigar band museum which might be worth a visit if you’re interested. enjoy another one of my collections of a collection.
