Another piece of ephemera: Murrang

Here's another weirdo from the university remainder shelf: the Estonian little magazine called Murrang. I have no idea what it means, but it's strictly culture and literature. Some of the contributors are well-known Estonian writers, such as Marie Under and A.H. Tammsaare. The year is 1921 of which I now seem to possess the whole yearly volume.

On the cover is a word that may be familiar even to foreigners: "sisu". Now, in Finnish that means (roughly) "guts", but it seems in Estonian mean "the contents". That's of course where the guts come from - inside you.

Another piece of ephemera

Another freebie find from the university library remainder shelf. This isn't actually ephemera - it's a real magazine, but it seems ephemeral at first sight. The year is 1926, and the subtitle says it all: "A periodical to the point on matters of health, wealth and life". The publisher was The C.W. Daniel Company working in London. It seems to be up and running still. Here's some background. Delsarte mentioned in the cover is one Francois Delsarte, a Frenchman who was born in 1811 and taught acting and drama.

There are some ads in the back pages. "P.R." Olnut Biscuits are advertised this way:

"It is generally admitted that most of us eat too much bread. Bread, if it is made from the whole wheat, is a good thing in itself, but eaten to the customary excess it becomes dangerous. It sets up an internal clogging that is well-known to be a principal root of most serious diseases."

Other advertisers include Nutona Rissola Powder and Eltekon Orthopaedic Institute.

New Commonwealth

I have a friend whose hobby is collecting narrow gauge railways. I don't know the current number - he had to sell one of his most precious German locomotives -, but at one time he had at least four locomotives. Besides that he has an old GMC truck and he at least used to have an old tractor - forgot the brand of that, sorry!

I had him in mind, when I picked up a copy of New Commonwealth from the early sixties from the remainder shelf at the university library. Nice rollers in the cover! There's also a full-page, four-colour commercial for an industrial locomotive in the mag. (If anyone wants to see that, just holler.)

Fascinating ephemera

I've been using the label "ephemera" when I've written about my own life or about family matters or stuff like that. The word is also used when one talks about little publications that don't fall into category of books or magazines. I have some fascination for this kind of publications and you can only wonder what I felt when I noticed that at the university library here in Turku there was a remainder shelf with very obscure ephemera (and to be sure, some books and periodicals also). And everything was free: take away! For four days, I spent my leisure time, away from reading my forgotten Finnish writers in the reading-room, digging the shelves and taking up everything that seemed even remotely interesting. ("Even remotely interesting": that sums up my life pretty much.)

I'll be posting some of my finds in coming days. At first we have a Hungarian cultural magazine from the thirties with a very nice Modernist Functionalist cover. I don't really know what the magazine is about, but who cares? (I'll be writing about Kevin Wignall's Who Is Conrad Hirst? as I promised, but that will have to wait, maybe till tomorrow. It was just as excellent as I first said.)