BROWN ANGELS and THE SCRAPBOOK OF FRANKIE PRATT

I’ve got two books to recommend you might be interested in if you love vernacular photography and ephemera.

The first, Brown Angels, is a small book of original poetry by Walter Dean Myers coupled with really wonderful photos of African-American children from the early 20th century. I found it in a used bookstore after Christmas and fell in love with the images before I'd even read the poems. It’s a really sweet and joyous children’s book, but being a collector of vernacular photography I knew I needed to add it to my collection of photo books, not just my children’s book collection.

The second, The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt: A Novel in Pictures, is simply a lot of fun. Author Caroline Preston has taken ephemera from her collection and created a “novel” telling the story of young Frankie Pratt from her teen years to early 20s. Page after page of what appears to be her scrapbook, a story unfolds of young Frankie’s life as she longs to be a writer. Love, college, Paris, and again love provide the storyline. I really can’t say enough about it. Wonderful images throughout and a real treasure trove for artists looking for inspiration.

To see more about either book you can click on the links in the left column to read reviews at Amazon.

JANVIER T. LEE'S Moment of recognition

Do you have newspaper clippings that extol about a relative or friend? Little pieces of ephemera filed away that you occasionally come upon?

I have several, including one about myself, well actually a drawing I did that was published in the Honolulu Star Bulletin. Most of the others are about my dad or mother. I do have one about a friend who was a singer, one of a friend dressed in a bikini for a local department store, and one of a friend winning a prize. Someday someone will find these after I've died and simply toss them. The person featured in the clipping will find that their fleeting moment of "fame" is officially over.

This fellow, Janvier T. Lee, has probably run close to the end of his shelf life. This clipping is in the Montez Lawton scrapbook. Google his name and nothing shows up. Dig a little deeper and I find that he died on March 7, 1989 at the age of 75 in Danville, California. He was born November 11, 1913 in Nebraska. Doing a small amount of math would indicate this clipping appeared in a local San Francisco Bay Area newspaper in 1946.

The store mentioned, Lucky, was a grocery store. Several years ago it went out of business. Then another company bought what was left of it, including the signage, and opened them back up.

I'm fascinated by how much ephemera I have, including photo collections, that belonged to people originally from Nebraska. How did so much ephemera end up from Nebraska in my hands. I can't think of any other state that features as prominently in my collection.

A HANDMADE GREETING CARD for Mrs. Lawton

Mrs. Lawton was well loved by her grade school students. Here's proof that one child took the time to create a special handmade card for their teacher.

Click on image to see it larger.

Notice the writing on the back which is clearly an attempt to make the card look official, done by a company; the RR company with apparently 113332 cards produced before this one.

Click on image to see it larger.

How would this child, now an adult, feel about having their artwork shared on this scale? Certainly it would thrill them to think that Mrs. Lawton cared enough to keep the very best.