Ephemera

Posted on 22 December 2018

This piece was originally published in Thimbleberry Magazine Volume 2, published January 2018. Volume 3 is available now.

At the Bulkley Valley Museum in Smithers, there is an exhibit titled “Ephemera: Things That Exist for a Short Time Only.” Included in the display is a 1949 wall calendar from the (now gone) McRae Hotel, a brochure for a previous incarnation of the annual Fall Fair and a newer paper bags from SpeeDee Printers (“Northern B.C.’s Office Experts Since 1958”).

“On it’s own individually an item of ephemera may seem trivial to preserve, but when several examples are examined together they can offer important insights into the past,” the exhibit explains.

“Historians study ephemera to understand social, cultural, and political views in a society, and how those views changed over time.”

Items of ephemera are “often paper-based”, including cards, movie tickets, menus, posters, and calendars. One paper-based item not listed is, I think, one of the most ephemeral of all: newspapers.

Consider this: in a grocery store, the item with the shortest shelf life is a newspaper. Thousands of pages of printed information lose their value in the time it takes a jug of milk to reach its best before date. Within 24 hours of rolling off the press, newspapers are worth more as kitty litter or birdcage lining than as a source of information about what’s going on in the world.

The inability of newspapers to retain value is reflected in their decline across the country and around the world. In the time between me writing and you reading this, more than 30 Canadian papers will cease publication, including the 128-year-old Moose Jaw Times. In a beautifully produced radio documentary for The Sunday Edition, David Gutnick visits the city to get a sense of what that means for people living there. The saddest part is the indifference expressed by a group of retired residents gathered at a local cafe. One person points out something I’ve heard many times before: by the time the paper comes along, you already know what’s in it, so what’s the point?

And yet, as the Bulkley Valley Museum explains, the value of ephemeral items is in aggregate, and accrues over time. I’m reminded of this frequently as I explore the Prince George Newspaper Digitization Project (pgnewspapers.pgpl.ca), a partnership between UNBC, CNC, the Prince George Public Library and the Prince George Citizen to make a searchable database of every paper published in the city, dating all the way back to the Fort George Tribune in 1909. In the earliest available issue of that paper we learn that there is a need for mail service more frequent than once a month, there’s an election, and that “booze” (the scare quotes are in the headline) is being sold illegally in Fort George.

Then there’s the ads. William Blair & Company promises to sells boots, blankets and hardware at “prices as low as at Quesnel.” WM F. Cooke proclaims his availability to take you by canoe or dog sled to any point on the Fraser River, and A.G. Hamilton advertises the pending sale of lots on the South Fort George Townsite. In just less than a quarter-page, a portrait of the community as it was is painted in a way I’m not sure any news story could.

I don’t say this to diminish the importance of a newspaper but rather, to heighten it. By running reports from city council and the courts alongside sports photos, wedding announcements, comics and advertising, you get a daily time capsule that has yet to be replicated in any other form. While we’ve taken to filling our social calendar with Facebook event invites, I wonder how we will find out what people were doing on evenings and weekends without the preserved community events page of a newspaper.

Seriously: try and figure out what was happening around town on May 25, 2017 using Facebook’s search feature. I can’t. I can, however tell you that on May 25, 1962, plans were underway for a cross-country ski trail cleanup at Hickory Wing, the high school was hosting an open house, and Prime Ministerial candidates John Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson were set to make dueling appearances in town for the ever-important Prince George vote. Plus, I learned by glancing around the page, rain was holding off wildfires, folks were having doubts about Saskatchewan’s plan for state medical care, and it was possible to have Lucky Lager delivered to your home for free.

When people talk about the closure of small-town newspapers it’s often on the subject of things like holding city hall to account and how we need investigative reporting that no one else will do. Which is true. But I also think the simple act of chronicling a community is important, and that happens in the non-news sections of a paper as much as in the headlines.

Recently, the website 250news.com shut down after pioneering the world of online news coverage in northern B.C. To its credit, the Exploration Place recognized the importance of the site’s twelve years of existence and ported its pages to an online archive of its own. While valuable, browsing through these archives of a digital news site don’t quite have the same effect as browsing through the archives of an actual newspaper, because all a news site has is the news: there are no ads, no weather, no… ephemera.

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