Centre for Ephemera Studies

The Centre for Ephemera Studies (CES), inaugurated by Lord Briggs in 1993, is a national focus for research into non-book documents, both manuscript and printed, including about typographic design, history of print production, the relationship between language and form, the reception of messages, and the social-material life of documents.

The CES holds about 100,000 items of printed ephemera from the eighteenth century to yesterday. They include the Maurice Rickards Collection and the Millennium Collection (which aim to be representative of ephemera) and several specialist collections, such as the Elizabeth Greig Collection of Civil Aviation, the Amoret Tanner Collection of book plates, the Sally de Beaumont Collection (with a strength in nineteenth-century trade cards), several collections of labels (hotel, wine, match, fruit, thread, etc), and a local collection. Though the majority of items are in the English language, CES has many examples of ephemera in other languages, particularly French. 

The CES works closely with the John Johnson Collection of the Bodleian Library (with whom it has an informal association). The CES was instrumental in the completion and publication of Maurice Rickards’s The Encyclopaedia of Ephemera (London: British Library, 2000). It has also produced a Directory of ephemera collections in the United Kingdom (2003) 

A key part of the CES work is ephemera description and terminology that resulted in a Thesaurus of ephemera terms (2013). This has now been adopted by the Library of Congress and the British Library, among others. It has provided the basis for an ongoing collaborative project (under the auspices of the university of Cergy-Pontoise) to produce a thesaurus of French terms.

New Directors

We are pleased to announce that Prof Rob Banham and Dr Emma Minns will succeed Prof Michael Twyman as Co-Directors of CES.

Michael Twyman Research Fellowships in Ephemera Studies 2026

We have awarded the Fellowship in Ephemera Studies to two excellent candidates:

Alice Crossley. ‘Feeling Things: Ephemera and Emotion’
This Fellowship will facilitate the completion Alice’s monograph, on emotion and nineteenth- century ephemera (e.g. greetings, trade, and mourning cards). Her book will demonstrate the significance of greetings cards and comparable paper ephemera as participants in discourses of feeling and identity construction in nineteenth-century Britain and America.

Catherine Moore. Book-related ephemera
This project considers how book-related ephemera can deepen our understanding of the books themselves. Catherine’s work aims to provide useful information concerning the motivations and methods that drove the production of those works.