The mantra of all kind of collecting is "condition, condition, condition..." Well, I've never been quite so sure and I think, actually, there are a lot of collectors out there of all kinds of things who would agree with me. I'm particularly keen on photographs and ephemera that 'show' they've had a bit of a life. These scraps of paper fell from a completely unremarkable, in fact frankly a bit crappy, copy of The Wind in the Willows. They are nothing more than someone's copies of E. H.Shepard's original illustrations for the book but they record maybe a couple of happy hours someone once spent doing something of no real consequence... the definition of ephemera!
