I spent a couple hours in the library yesterday scavening for loose ephemera. The library no longer uses cards at the back of books to track check-outs, or the small sheets of paper with date stamps. Everything is electronic. Occasionally you’ll find a book that houses such a card or sheet, but hunting is hard going since these papers are nearly extinct. Or they are extinct; what’s still there is just fossils.
But in two hours I was elated to find 11 old cards. My favorite is the one pictured from a book called Lustig Gebabbel: Sammlung Frankfurter Dialektdichtungen aus alter und neuer Zeit. You can’t tell which year the book was first checked out because the date stamps note no year until we get to a handwritten Jun. 21, 1937. The book is then checked out every year until Feb. 19, 1943, the year bombing began in earnest in Frankfurt. It was especially heavy in 1944 and continued into early 1945. The war ended that spring.
The book is taken out again on April 15, 1946. In 1947 it’s taken out eight times. Boy, people were really hungry for poetry written in the Frankfurt dialect.
The library card makes history tactile. I’d meant to use this and the other cards for collage but this one will be spared. The others, also aged and discolored, will do as well. 
2 thoughts on “Loose Ephemera”
This could be a wonderful novel you know. I miss these cards as well and have many find memories of reading them in the back of my town and high school libraries. Thanks for sharing.
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