The major source on the history of the John Johnson Collection remains the catalogue of the 1971 Bodleian exhibition: The John Johnson Collection, catalogue of an exhibition (Oxford, 1971). As it is now nearly out of print, it is intended to reprint the introduction: John Johnson and his collection of printed ephemera and also to mount it on the Internet. The following gives a brief introduction to the formation of the Collection.

John de Monins Johnson was born in 1882 in Lincolnshire and was educated in Oxford, at Magdalen College School and then Exeter College, where he read Classics and later Arabic. He entered the Egyptian Civil Service, but resigned after political changes in Egypt. He then became a papyrologist, discovering in Antinoë a papyrus of Theocritus pre-dating by 900 years any previously known manuscript of the author. Papyrology was the principal inspiration for the Collection: ‘Often I used to look over those dark and crumbling sites and wonder what could be done to treat the background of our own English civilization with the same minute care with which we scholars were treating the ancient.’

The outbreak of the First World War brought Johnson, unfit for military service, back to Oxford. He gained employment at the Oxford University Press as Assistant Secretary to the Delegates of the Press. After the war, he remained at the Press, becoming Printer to the University from 1925 to 1946. He died in 1956.

Collecting ephemeral printing was Johnson’s hobby. He was a pioneer in the collection of ephemera on a wide scale. His collection encompasses the whole of typographic and social history. He wrote: ‘I challenge any... to suggest any subject in which we can record no evidence at all! Yes, there is the birth of the football pool there, and all kinds of bookies’ tickets and wireless licences.’

When Johnson’s collection outgrew the shoe boxes in which it was stored at his home, he was given the former Bible Printers’ Office to house it at the Oxford University Press. He named the Collection ‘The Constance Meade Memorial Collection of Ephemeral Printing’, after one of his benefactors. It was renamed ‘The John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera’ when it came to the Bodleian. The association with the Oxford University Press enabled Johnson to mount his collection on good quality paper and also to bind the spines of the box files in which he kept it in different colours to denote the main divisions. Apprentices tooled leather labels for many of the c. 680 subject headings. The material was cleaned, mounted, sorted and indexed (in rudimentary fashion) by Johnson’s (often unpaid) assistant, Lilian Thrussell, née Gurden (who also accompanied the Collection to its new home in the Bodleian), and by Elizabeth Fraser. With the exception of a few lists, mainly of books, no attempt was made to form an item-by-item catalogue of the Collection. At a time when the latest cataloguing technology was the file card, the card index would have been more extensive than the Collection itself.

Johnson collected retrospectively (except in the field of Private Presses and also some developing technologies), believing that material should survive by chance rather than by design. The oldest ephemera in the Collection are two fragments of an indulgence, printed by Pynson in 1508. The Collection has substantial holdings of 16^th- and 17^th-century material, but is strongest in the 18^th, 19^th and early 20^th centuries. It contains over one million items.

After Johnson’s death in 1956, the Collection (which belonged to the University) remained at the Oxford University Press until 1968. It was felt at this time that the Bodleian Library was better equipped to make it available to researchers. Its acquisition was a significant one, representing a volte-face in the Library’s attitude to ephemeral materials. These had been casualties not only of the space crisis of the 1930s but also of academic disdain for ‘material of no literary or artistic value or of an ephemeral nature which it is not in the interests of the Library to include in the general catalogue or to preserve on its shelves’ (The Bodleian Library Record, October 1938, reporting on the eliminations from the Library, which had been permitted by a new clause of the Bodleian’s Statute). Through the offices of Johnson’s friend Strickland Gibson, the Bodleian’s first Keeper of Printed Books, much of the eliminated material was incorporated into Johnson’s collection and thus returned to the library in 1968.

As is so often the case, the change in attitude was far from confined to Oxford. Simultaneously in New York, Bella C. Landauer (1875-1960) was forming her collection of ‘business and advertising art’ housed now, as in her lifetime, at the New-York Historical Society. There were already many collections of what is now termed ‘printed ephemera’ in public institutions. Where the Constance Meade Memorial Collection and the Bella C. Landauer Collection differed from previous such collections was in their scope. John Johnson had used the words ‘ephemeral printing’ and ‘printed ephemera’ in defining his own collection. In 1962, John Lewis’s seminal work Printed Ephemera brought together for the first time germane materials from different public and private collections on both sides of the Atlantic, including those of John Johnson and Bella C. Landauer. The book, copiously illustrated, established the term ‘printed ephemera’ in the public consciousness and imagination. Suddenly, widely diverse materials, from tickets to posters, trade cards to broadsides, menus to ballads, gained an identity, a cohesion. Collections which had often escaped bibliographic control and therefore remained uncatalogued became part of a greater whole. What unified this material was that it should not have survived its immediate purpose. Slowly, its importance began to be recognised by academics and by amateurs (in the true sense of that word). Here was uninterpreted social documentation, authentic material which had been used and perused by our forebears.

Ephemera societies were formed, first in this country in 1975 (by Maurice Rickards) then in the USA, Canada, Australia and Denmark. Letterpress-printed ephemera were included in the Eighteenth-Century Short-Title Catalogue, making the material and its location in public collections known. Many books and theses have been written both about and using printed ephemera. There is now a Centre for Ephemera Studies at Reading University, an Encyclopedia of Ephemera and a Register of Ephemera Collections on CD-ROM. All this has come about in the last 70 years and the tide seems unlikely to turn. The latest opportunities for making ephemera more widely known and available have come through the Internet.

The John Johnson Collection is committed to making its resources available on the Internet, by ready access to indexes, catalogue records and images. This will help remote users to discover whether the Collection holds material relevant to their research and, where the material is digitised, to study it electronically. It will also increasingly enable Bodleian readers to cross-search the Collection electronically and to order only those items of relevance to their research, rather than browsing through several boxes of the Collection with the concomitant risk of damage to the material. Another considerable advantage of electronic access is that people will use it who have perhaps previously heard neither of printed ephemera nor of the John Johnson Collection.

The first resource of researchers using the John Johnson Collection is the list of Main Subject Headings. This is available in two forms: an alphabetical listing and the same list divided into the global headings: Advertisements; Art and Architecture; Artists; Authors; Booktrade and Publishing History; Education; Entertainment; Ephemera kept by its Form (trade cards, tickets, bookmarkers, greetings cards, etc.); Pastimes; Political, Religious, Social and Economic History; Printing Processes; Prints; Private Presses; Sport; Transport; Travel and Holidays, etc.

Beyond these lists, there are two main finding aids in the John Johnson Collection: the indexes (which describe the arrangement of the materials in Johnson’s boxes) and the item-by-item catalogue.

Indexes are available to the majority of the sections of the Collection. They enable the researcher to see the scope and content of the material in a given section. These lists rarely give details of individual items. They are, however, the first resource, as the catalogue of the Collection is incomplete.

From 1995 an item-by-item catalogue has been in formation. The aim is to catalogue and also to digitise as much of the Collection as possible. This will enable us to increase the number of access points to the Collection, drawing together the many threads which run through it (artists, engravers, printers, places, products, trades, dates, etc.) A tagged cataloguing format has been created, within the user-configurable German bibliographic database system, allegro-C, allowing detailed cataloguing of this bibliographically elusive material and enabling us to index the information contained in the item (which varies according to the category of ephemera), rather than record the absence of standard bibliographic information (title, author, date, etc.).

Both the indexes and the online catalogue are on the Internet at: http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/johnson/ and the user can discover here which sections have been catalogued and which digitised.

Pre-dating the online catalogue is the Toyota project (funded by Toyota City, Japan), a stand-alone database, with images of all the motor car ephemera in the Collection and 1,000 further transport images ( http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/toyota/).

The Ballads Catalogue has metadata (using the allegro-C cataloguing format) and linked images for all Bodleian ballads, including those in the John Johnson Collection ( http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ballads/).

An early digital project in the John Johnson Collection using allegro-C focussed on political and satirical prints, as well as trades and professions prints. These are available through the John Johnson Collection website and through VADS (the Visual Arts and Humanities Database): http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/ where they can be searched in conjunction with visual materials from other collections.

The trade cards and bill headings in the Collection are kept by trade. This necessarily means the first-named trade. In cataloguing the material now, each and every product and trade is indexed. This enables us to build up an understanding of the nature of trade and of the distribution and sale of products. Researchers interested in ‘mirrors’, ‘pounce’ or ‘coffins’ can find not only the obvious examples but also those cards or tradesmen’s lists in which their specialist interest might be the fifth or fiftieth named product. Tradesmen’s lists are particularly revealing as they attempt to list the tradesman’s entire stock. All names and addresses are indexed, enabling researchers to track tradesmen, engravers, printers, etc. The iconographic content of the card is also indexed: trade signs, products, manufacturing processes, premises, etc. The Library of Congress Thesaurus for Graphic Materials is used as an indexing tool, supplemented where necessary.

The main sequence of trade cards and of tradesmen’s lists are already digitised, and it is hoped to complete the process and to digitise the booktrade trade cards and the bill headings in the near future. The cataloguing and digitisation of trade cards provides an opportunity to create a virtual collection of these materials, even within the John Johnson Collection itself as, apart from the main sequences of Trade Cards and Bill Headings, trade ephemera are dispersed among Booktrade; Circulating Libraries; Oxford Trade; Tradesmen’s Lists; a volume of Sheffield trade ephemera; Albums; and the Bridgnorth Collection.