Vintage Mardi Gras Ball Collectibles Are Colorful and Unique

Do you have purple, green and gold jewelry and clothes? Then you are halfway to properly celebrating Mardi Gras in New Orleans (February 21 this year) and acquiring some Mardi Gras memories and future collectibles. Mardi Gras ball invitations, dance cards and other paper ephemera are great collectibles because they often were just tossed after […]

Storing Paper

Paper must “breathe.” Don’t keep it in a sealed package. It will eventually become moldy.    

Fraktur: Celebrating Family and Faith

You may have seen the lettering style before but not realized that fraktur (pronounced “frock-tour”) is a form of early American folk art. German settlers who came to Pennsylvania in the 18th and 19th centuries brought this style of writing and embellished it with religious and artistic symbols to record local and family history, making […]