While elites have long bestowed self-conscious diaries and shiny book collections upon research libraries, ephemera has usually ended up in the trash. That’s tragic, because the cheapness of ephemera has historically let working-class and poor people create it. Without such documents, historians who write about marginal communities might have to look more to the words of people like doctors, reformers, and police, who have historically been biased against these communities.
Source: A Legendary Erotic Archive Has Been Out of Public View For Decades. We Found It. | Observer
