Collecting Vintage Retro Mid-Century Illustrations
If you're looking for a category of ephemera to collect, you'd do well to considering mid-century advertising art like this illustration produced for Stecher, Traung & Schmidt, a 100-year old lithographer in San Francisco. Original commercial works from the tail end of the Golden Age of American illustration 
I'd often thought it would be fun to try to purchase the unsigned original art from the archives of defunct advertising agencies. When I worked for a small ad agency back in the late 1980s, I was struck by the great work being done by the art department. Back then, agencies still did all their art work by hand--using pencil, water color, or air brush. A great deal of the art work was stunning. When the project was over, it would all get bundled into a big folder and filed.
I'll bet a lot of the artwork produced by my old employer was eventually thrown in a dumpster when the agency folded. However, as is the case with this example, sometimes an agency's archives are preserved, and eventually offered to the public through auction.
So, if you've been searching for a type of ephemera to collect, maybe you should consider mid-century advertising illustration art.
