I’ve mentioned before that I’m an ephemera collector, inasmuch as I’ve saved everything I’ve found left inside of books for a number of years now - from title cards to bookmarks, to things that aren’t bookmarks but nobly performed as such.

Working at a library for a decade has had these rewards, but none so significantly unusual as the things that come in alongside the boxes of books. See, when people get rid of books, they seem to activate a tidal wave of a purge from their lives and strange things get swept up along on the tide. Old locks, seasoning packets, photographs, flower seeds, diapers and diplomas are some of the more common things that we find at the bottom of donation boxes. Dead animals are not too uncommon, if this is a box that spent a winter in the garage before it found its way to us. I don’t collect those, because despite what this blog would imply, I have my limits.

Insects and beautiful bird skeletons aside, of course.

In a box of recent donations, we found an old journal written by a kid named Evan. It’s a Star Wars : Episode I journal, and it contains three days in the life of a child, from October 6th, 2001 until the 8th. Every page has a short observation about something that occurred to him that day, and a small illustration of the thought. After that is a large section of missing pages, torn for the book for some mysterious reason, probably just as interesting as the remaining contents.

I don’t know if many people would be impressed or be as enthralled as I am, but I think it’s an amazing glimpse into these few days, and the breadth of this kid’s thoughts in that time. They range from Legos, to his friends, and even a reflection upon the World Trade Center attacks - which is perhaps the most resonant thing of all, not so much in the observation itself, just that it was observed at all. In terms of ephemera, what’s more ephemeral than a unique record of passing thoughts?

The whole thing in punctuated by a large drawing in brown marker, though I can’t tell what animal it’s supposed to be. At the moment, it’s the most interesting thing in the book-related ephemera collection, and not just because it shares my love of Legos and Nintendo - but something else fascinating also came in around the same time.

This envelope. Sure, it’s just a collection of doodles without any real destination, but somehow it manages to almost completely encompass the whole world of awesome. It has evidence that this doodler is an artist of some skill and intent, but the inclusion of a robot, a ninja, a dragon and a UFO in the same image probably could never be beat, even if I dedicated the rest of my creative life to capturing the idea of Awesome more concisely. The horse in a suit, the large turtle, the hummingbird and the portrait of the old man make this a wholly surreal piece, plumbing the depths of the subconscious and the id.

In fact, Surrealists were known to engage in ‘automatic drawing’ regularly - just letting their mind wander and allowing their hands to follow. It was the classic equivalent of these telephone doodles, which I would argue are even more pure because they’re even MORE automatic than sitting down with the intention to draw. Either way, I want to meet this guy and draw the hell out of a sketchbook together. I’m assuming this is a male artist because of the inclusion of ninjas and robots, which disproportionately skews towards the male demographic. If this is a female artist, consider this my marriage proposal.

Shall we look at my modest collection of Roseville Pottery and wonder, “What If” I had been more aggressive in purchasing Roseville after receiving my first piece all those many years ago. That first one came to me from a distant relative by way of my mother, when wifey had admired it as it sat in the basement of my parent’s home among nice but common planters by McCoy and Hull.

The other objects were purchased over the years as we traveled our sphere of antique hunting, for fun and profit. Other purchases were made from time to time when prices at antique stores, estate sales and flea markets were so compelling that we could not pass them up.

Roseville started production in 1892 located in (Oh No You Guessed It) Roseville, Ohio, later moving and expanding in Zanesville, Ohio. Over the years, following the directions of their various artists and competing with the likes of Weller, their catalog changed and increased with fascinating designs and styles, named for the floral detailing, or period design.

As time passed, attitudes on collecting and decorating have changed as have the prices of most pottery from companies like Weller, Roseville, Stangl and Hull. We saw very few items offered at first and prices were low, but as decorating styles changed from the “Modern” look so prevalent in the Fifties and Sixties returning to more traditional styles, old decorative pottery again found its place. As cheap imports flooded the market, production decreased and the company closed in the mid Fifties.

Our collection includes these examples:

White Rose Vase 1945

Zephyr Lily Bowl 1946,

Clematis Vase 1944

Freesia Basket 1945, My favorite,

I will admit a few of our purchases have found new homes, as profit ruled over hoarding.

Most sought by true Roseville aficionados are the experimental pieces with various glazes that never went into full production, but we;re not likely to see these in our normal travels. Highly regarded are their jardinières sitting on matching pedestals.

These days we see an abundance of Roseville in antique stores across the Midwest, and with prices lower than they have been in many years. Of course, the floral patterns are easily spotted, but it takes a trained eye to spot other less known pattern, and that were we always turn to our library of collector books.

For Roseville its Warmans Companion, Roseville Pottery by Mark F. Moran published in 2006 by Krause Publishing Co., bought it on line from Amazon.

A few weeks ago I was the lucky bidder on a vintage cook book. I must admit, my interest in the book was not so much ‘culinary’ as it was the historical proof that there is nothing ‘new’ in the latest Hollywood glamour cook books, like The Black Book of Hollywood Diet Secrets by Kym Douglas & Cindy Pearlman; but this is not the main tale of this collecting adventure.

Like most collectors, I was lured to this particular copy for its conditions (clean pages, sound binding, etc. & it included a most rare dust jacket) as well as some particularly unique pieces of ephemera.

Included with the copy of the Hollywood Glamour Cook Book by Mariposa was a copy of a newspaper clipping of the author, several copies of the sender’s postal money orders, a postcard in the author’s handwriting (with her signature), and a postal envelope, also in the author’s handwriting.

It was my hope, not simply as a collector but as a researcher, that the ephemera would prove useful (as well as valuable) in searching for information on the author as there is little information on her.

I knew there was little information on Mariposa before I bid. I had accidentally discovered knowledge of her and this book in doing other research and was intrigued by the title and the one-name author that I stopped the first search to work on Mariposa.

I kept watching for affordable copies (in many online stores it is listed over $50, plus shipping; this was $30 with shipping, plus the extras mentioned) until I found, and won, this one.

While waiting for the book to arrive, I continued to research but found little and, frustrated by hitting ‘a wall’, I waited for the book to arrive, hoping it & the ephemera would provide additional, helpful, clues.

The book itself offered little information. The “I Am” was a beguiling bit, but with little information:

Your “Mystic Pot,” with Herbs and Spice,
I charm your meals and make them nice.
I make your cake and pastry good
With secret hints from Hollywood.

First I learned Mariposa’s name from the return address and signature: Mariposa Hayes. Putting that into search engines, I learned that Mariposa was a pseudonym, and that Mariposa Hayes had renewed the copyright to this book in 1967. And I discovered that a Mariposa Hayes was a performer in Spring 3100 in 1928. This made sense with the jacket’s front flap information regarding, “Who is Mariposa?” which mentioned her “living part of the modern theatre.” And 1928 would make sense with the 1940 copyright date too.

Plus, there is the book’s lovely black and white photo of Mariposa, credited to Murray Korman, a rather popular New York commercial photographer who took portraits of a number of theatre and silent film actors. Korman was even well-known enough to be quoted in Time (March 22, 1937) — for something darn near unforgivable in my book:

“Look at Katharine Hepburn,” said Photographer Korman, “there was a girl with no looks but a college education and hasn’t she made a success of herself?”

See how easy it is to get derailed in research? Everything is so fascinating!

But back to Mariposa.

There was also scant, teasing information of a Mariposa Hayes in the 1930 New York Social Blue Book, living with, it appears, a Mrs. C. Coleman and a Mr. Nelson Taylor Hayes. Further research on those names yielded nothing on Mariposa; however, Mr. Nelson Taylor Hayes may have been the 1941 author of the novel Bahama Passage, which went on to become a film with Dorothy Dandridge, among others.

I turned next to the copy of the newspaper clipping. There was no date, no publication, but the photo’s caption reads:

Mariposa, author of “Hollywood Glamor Cook Book,” points out a few choice recipes in her book to John H. Hayes. She tells him that glamor is not confined to the feminine contingent but young men can take a page from her book and improve their complexions and looks.

John H. Hayes? Was that a relative? (And if so, how tacky to pass-off him off as other than a relative!) It is difficult to tell from the poor photocopy of what I gather was a black and white newspaper clipping how old Mariposa was, but Mr. Hayes is sort of lumped into the category of “young men” here… So the still beautiful, but possibly of the ‘well preserved’ variety, Mariposa was photographed with her son?

A quick search shows John Hayes to be a rather common name, and, if you can trust Wikipedia, there are a number of relatively famous ones… Including in film, a B-Movie maker born in 1930.

If John was her son, that could account for Mariposa’s short lived theatre career. But so can a million things, including lack of talent.

So far, there was little to go on — lots of fascinating detour possibilities, but not much on Mariposa.

Who was Mariposa?

I looked at the title page. Normally researching book publishers offers little, but I was desperate here… Published by Glamour Publications, 1265 S. W. 11th St., Miami, Florida. That sounded familiar — too familiar. I looked back at the addresses on the ephemera; yup, that was Mariposa’s home address. So it looks like the book was self published by the entrepreneurial Mariposa.

But searches for the publisher name only returned other copies of the book, each with less information than I had already forced from the Internet. M. Barrows & Company, Inc, the “trade distributors” offered nothing either.

I stopped to recap: She was an actress in 1928, she lived in Miami and had written and published a book in 1940. That’s it. No information on marriage or family.

Most folks I know would have quit by now; even the obsessive ones. But not me. I thumbed through the book again. The contents were recipes, more clever, cutesy poetry, and the foreward was just a general sales pitch for the contents.

I looked at the dust jacket again. Ah, another book for sale on the back inside flap… Eat to Grow Young, by H. A. Hayes, N.D. Another Hayes! And wasn’t that familiar sounding too? I flipped to the front of the book, to the dedication:

To Dr. Henri A. Hayes

To “Doc” who is a connoisseur
Of Crepes Suzette and Petit Beurre,
Who helped inspire many treats
Found in this book of health recipes.

Along with the corny (and ill-rhyming) poem was more than probably the H.A. Hayes from the other book. (N.D, is, after all, a naturopathic doctor — but a “Doc” nevertheless!)

A quick search later and I found a Dr. H. A. Hayes, but it just didn’t seem to fit. While I didn’t know the age of this 1940 Dr. Hayes, the tiny bit of information suggested nothing of naturopathic medicine, let alone Mariposa. But I continued to search…

And then, in searching for H. A. Hayes and Eat to Grow Young, I discovered another clue — a clue that had me ‘hoot’ at the monitor and forced hubby to turn away from his computer and ask me if I was OK.

In the copyright renewals for 1961, I saw that Eat to Grow Young’s copyright was renewed by Mariposa, whose Glamour Publications had published it (as seen on the jacket flap). But the exciting part was that Dr. Henri Hayes was also a pseudonym — “SEE Hayes, Henrietta A.” And right below that, the listing for Hayes, Henrietta A. was the fact that Mariposa Hayes had renewed the copyright.

Another relative? Her mother?

I don’t know. I found no additional information on Henrietta. You’d think a female naturopathic doctorate who authored a book in 1934 would be easy to find; but sadly, no.

Then again, you’d think a glamorous woman known only by her first name, who peddled self-published beauty books would also have some sort of legacy.

I may have hit a wall for now, but I have not given up. Mariposa’s words on the postcard, checking on the safety of the book mailed in 1983, ring true for me:

The book is so precious, it should have been insured. I was very reluctant to part with it because as a collectors item too it is very valuable, but you wrote so nicely, so let me know!!!! I’ll be worrying, Mariposa Hayes

Mr. M Kopal, the recipient of this rare book, lovingly kept the book safe with all the ephemera for 25 years, only to have his family/estate rid themselves of it. Now I have it, and like most things I collect, the hunt for more information continues. Like a dog with a bone. Not that beautiful Mariposa should be compared thus; only my obsessive dedication to research.

If you have any information, please, share it!

Historically, the ‘Malleus Maleficarum’, or ‘The Hammer of Witches’, was a book written in 1486 by a pair of ornery witch hunters, during the height of the persecution of these perceived ‘witches’. The invention of the printing press around this time allowed the book to spread far and wide, despite being banned by the Catholic Church as ‘unethical’. It’s a very interesting read, with entire chapters dedicated to things like “What do you do if you’ve been physically emasculated by a witch?”, which seemed to be a fairly major concern. That, and witchcraft being an affront to God, of course - but mostly, there was a lot of terror about strange vanishings in trouser town, all written in an anecdotal style akin to ‘one time I heard about this guy and this thing TOTALLY happened to him.’

The book also addresses the fact that witches can turn men into beasts, though they rarely seem to turn other females into lesser forms. By extension, these witches also had the power to make themselves ridiculously seductive, so that barely any magic was needed against whichever male they sought to ruin - just purely biological sex appeal. This is the complicated premise of the eleventh and latest set of Demons Chronicle gashapon, created by Yanoman in Japan.

I’ve always loved this ongoing collection for just how bizarre and obscure the premises for each set of surreal creatures has been. Because everything is written in Japanese, I know very little about the origins of each specific, diverse figure, but every time I obtain a new set (always ordered directly from Japan, as there’s no real market for them in the US), it’s always a fun game of detection and discovery, trying to glean the purpose of everything - looking up Japanese mythology, piecing together hiragana phrases, and eventually coming up with not a lot, but learning interesting things nonetheless. The creatures inspire new paintings from me, and it’s worth the nervous wait as a box of these things makes its untrackable way from overseas.

This eleventh series is composed entirely of female figures in mythical animal forms. They’re about 2 inches tall, with an additional heavy base for each figure, and they all come disassembled into about six or seven pieces each, which must be put together very delicately. Every figure comes in two different color schemes - a painted, full-color version, and a beige, statuesque version. New to this series is the option to display each figure with a human head, or an alternate scary animal head - revealing the duality of the nature of these shapely witches. Don’t be fooled, guys - it’s no fun to make out with a bird skull.

Since these do come from overseas, where the attitude towards the nude human form is more relaxed, many of the Demons Chronicle figures might be considered risqué. Still, it isn’t without reason. A witch in a baggy sweater isn’t going to be quite as effective as a naked one. Combining female forms with animal forms is also nothing new for Japanese toys - but most of the examples of this also wouldn’t be appropriate for a PG blog.

The most bizarre figure in the series is the rotund Elephant Woman, who comes with a pachyderm head, and clutching a giant fork and knife - which strikes me as a strangely malicious depiction of the overweight. I can always enjoy a good succubus hanging off of a church steeple, a frog faerie, and an Egyptian-themed depiction of a female Grim Reaper with an alternate skull head. I enjoy them because they’re such a large step away from what we usually see in figural form in our own mass toy market. I can only take so many iterations of Spider-Man before I stop being interested and need a break.

There are ten different witches in the series, with a rare eleventh mystery figure. You can see nine of them in our Community Section, at the end of my Demons Chronicle collection.

I keep a scrapbook, but I didn’t always. I started to tape unimportant scraps of papers and receipts and tickets to things into a plain ol’ inglorious composition notebook about two years ago, when I suddenly realized that time was flying by and I had almost nothing to show for it. Heck, I barely even remembered anything happening for at least a year, and this from a guy who’s never touched a memory-damaging substance - so I decided to chronicle the proof. You know, just to have something to refer to when someone eventually asks me, “Where were you on the night of…?” I like to avoid unjust incrimination whenever possible. Also, just incrimination.

During my cleaning frenzy, I’ve come across a few artifacts that are supposed to have an amazing sentimentality for me, but only serve to conjure discomfort and a little bit of bile. For example, a cheap memorial glass from my senior prom.

As far as proms go, my school dropped the ball. It was a heavy ball, and it landed on the toes of every senior, which were broken and eventually turned gangrenous and had to be removed by the school nurse, who was equipped with only a hammer and a butter knife. This is my recollection of my high school, which sagely put the potentially toxic art and chemistry classrooms in windowless, airless cells at the center of the building. When an alarmingly large percentage of the teaching staff were found to have brain tumors, no one acted that surprised.

So, I have this glass, inscribed with the date of the prom and a cute little picture. The venue was grungy, and food was sub-par, it was expensive, and we had an unbearably bad DJ instead of a live band. The girl I attended prom with and I went to college together before she ran away to France, but not before having her own romantic adventures moments after we broke up, and calling me up at my friends’ dorm rooms while I played GoldenEye, pestering me to ‘come home’. These are not warm memories, but the prom cup remains on my desk. This is for two reasons.

First of all, it provides an excellent perch for my Madman action figure. And second, I feel obligated to keep it, for the same reason I’m obligated to carry around prayer cards from the funerals of dead relatives and bits of evidence from car accidents. These are negative mementos, so why do we keep them?

The best that I can come up with is that they’re important things, even if they don’t make us feel great. We are, if nothing else, the sum of all of these things. I still keep a large, wooden box of gifts and cute little things that my last girlfriend and I exchanged and I can’t yet see parting with. Years later, after we refused to talk to each other, and began talking to each other again, I was helping her clean her apartment and found a wooden box of things that I’d given her. We’re not talking again now, because that’s how these things go, but I hope that we both still have our boxes. It was almost seem morally offensive to discard anything so intensely personal. If I ever get an organ or limb removed, you can bet I’m going to ask for it in a plastic baggie. My dentist almost seemed grossed out when I asked him if I could have my surgically-removed wisdom tooth. It just seemed natural to me. I keep things.

So, this swollen, painful, obtrusive wisdom tooth of a glass from my senior prom probably isn’t long for this world, but it’s been a difficult decision to make. I have a black & white polaroid of my and my once-beloved all dressed up and ready to be punched in the face by prom disappointment, and it’s more evidence than I need. It takes up less space, and it doesn’t convey any fake-cute sentiments. And helpfully, writing so much about that fateful glass is helping me in the process of getting rid of it. I mean really, we didn’t even dance when ‘Moondance’ came over the tinny speakers. That song has ‘dance’ in the title. One is contractually obligated to dance to it. Well, that and ‘Rock Lobster’. What, they didn’t make you sign the contract?

I’m not that sentimental, but there are some things that need to stick around, whether we like it or not.

(And I encourage you to comment below about things that you’ve carried around for years and don’t particularly enjoy having!)