Antique Spectacles and other Vision Aids ('the online museum and encyclopedia of vision aids') is a site which caught my imagination from our first involvement with it and its very enthusiastic and knowledgeable curator, Dr Fleishman. It is a shining example of a site which uses ephemera to tell their part of the story (in this case of the history of spectacles) in conjunction with the widest possible range of other media. I thought I would look at it again to see if I could justify including it as an Ephemera resource, and I was amply rewarded. The new Quick links include pages aimed at librarians and curators. Of particular note is a discussion of the
Edward Scarlett trade card: the newly discovered Bodleian version, 1714-1727 (not JJ Coll but Douce adds 139 (766)), with pop-up transcriptions and enlargements of details, and a scholarly comparison of the two known versions of the card (one of which is represented in two collections).
This is supplemented by a slide show of other optical trade cards from a wide range of collections, including the John Johnson Collection, all with mouse-over pop-up enlargements.
The whole site is fascinating, but also of particular interest to ephemerists are three slide shows of
spectacles on stamps, a slide show of
paper labels rarely seen, and slide shows of
spectacle peddlers, and
International currency showing spectacles.
A site to enjoy for itself as much as for its ephemera!
Spectacles are eyeglasses. People wear spectacles because their vision is flawed. Spectacles is an old-fashioned word,
ReplyDeletebut it means something you probably see and maybe even use — every day