The basement smells of cold and paper. It always smells of cold and paper. Marcus Veen has been collecting printed ephemera for twenty-three years and the smell has followed him from a student flat in Utrecht to this converted warehouse in the east of Amsterdam, where twelve thousand items are catalogued, acid-free, in archival boxes he orders from a supplier in Belgium.
Veen’s collection has no clear thesis. It includes mid-century Dutch department store catalogues, a near-complete run of a Belgian typographic journal that ceased publication in 1967, several hundred railway timetables from operators that no longer exist, and approximately 1,400 risograph-printed zines from the 2010s and early 2020s. What these things share, Veen explains, is not aesthetic kinship but a quality of vulnerability.
“Nobody was going to save them,” he says, lifting a timetable from the Chemin de Fer du Nord printed in 1953, its cover a deep cobalt with white letterpress text. “The libraries didn’t want them. The museums didn’t want them. They were one skip away from being gone.”
The preservation of printed ephemera exists in a peculiar gap in institutional memory. Libraries collect books; museums collect objects; archives collect documents. A supermarket circular from 1974, a concert programme printed in one colour on newsprint, a business card with letterpress debossing — these fall between categories, too quotidian for institutional prestige, too fragile for private indifference.
What has changed in the last decade is the rise of a distributed network of collectors who are, collectively, building something that no single institution would have chosen to. They find each other on forums, at fairs, through dealers who know what they’re looking for. They swap duplicates. They digitise and share. In some cases they have begun to think seriously about what happens to their collections when they are gone.
In Tokyo, a designer named Keiko Hara has spent fifteen years assembling what may be the world’s most significant collection of Japanese commercial ephemera from the Showa period: product wrappers, advertising cards, match-box labels, sweet-shop bags. She has digitised approximately 40 percent of it and published a portion online, where it has become a reference resource for designers and historians working across three continents.
“The tragedy of this material is also its beauty,” Hara tells me over a video call, her bookshelves a deep background of organised colour. “It was made to be used and thrown away. The fact that it survived at all is almost accidental. The people who designed these things had no idea anyone would still be looking at them. That innocence — you can feel it in the work.”
Back in Amsterdam, Veen pulls out a box of risograph zines from 2017 and 2018, the years before Riso printing became fully absorbed into the aesthetic mainstream. “These are already rare,” he says, handling one with the practiced lightness of long practice. “Ten years from now people will be writing about this period the way they write about the little magazines of the 1960s. I want to make sure the things exist to write about.”
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