History of the Collection
Collecting printed ephemera was Johnson’s hobby, from the early 1930s until his death in 1956. Johnson collected retrospectively. The earliest piece of printed ephemera in the Collection dates form 1508 but its strengths are in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. He assembled c. 1.5 million items, divided into 680 subject headings.
Inspired by his former career as a papyrologist, Johnson viewed the Collection as excavating the waste paper of our recent past. In the broad range of this vision, Johnson was a pioneer. Previous collectors had focussed on one area of what came to be known as printed ephemera (ballads, trade cards or bookplates for example). John Johnson collected it all, forming (in his own words):
“a little museum of common printed things, to illustrate at one and the same time the historical development of our social life and the development of printing”
Initially housed at the Oxford University Press (where it was known as the Constance Meade Memorial Collection of Ephemeral Printing after one of his benefactors), the Collection moved to the Bodleian in 1968. There was a major exhibition in 1971 and the catalogue: John Johnson Collection, catalogue of an exhibition, remains the standard work on the Collection.
The term ‘printed ephemera’, although used privately by John Johnson, was established in the public consciousness in 1962 by John Lewis’s work of that name which drew on Johnson’s collection, among others, to illustrate the range of ephemera.
Johnson's legacy to the University was thus a unique Collection of (mainly) printed, (mainly) single sheet material, which provides the social and printing historian alike with primary research material, and the picture researcher with striking images - products of the woodblock, the engraver's plate, the lithographer's stone, etc.