Solid State Evaporates

There was a time when I used to have even more free time than I do now, which is pretty much a lot of free time, and I used to frequent the used bookstores even more so than I do now (which, truth be told, has not been so often ever since the fall of bookstores in the city), and I used to rifle through books which seemed of interest to me to see if there was any ephemera contained inside.  This could be a letter, bookmark, postcard, et cetera- anything, really, as long as it bore the mark of somebody having read it (although I do not value anybody's having written anything inside it, unless it was the author him or herself in his or her own copy).  I collected a bunch of these worthless things over the years, but in my usual bouts of clean up clean out (which are becoming ever so more frequent with my desire to unhoard practically everything to a state that even a master of minimalism would go out of his mind), most of these things have been chucked away.

A few weeks ago, there was a copy of the collected edition of Prince Valiant (once a valued item, but now made essentially worthless by the brilliant new republication in hardcover), and I was leafing through it and out popped a clip-out from the Sunday, May 25, 1980 edition of some philadelphia newspaper.  I was excited to see it, as usually collectors clip out many of these to be pasted up into a scrapbook.  Alas, what I found was entirely half-baked, probably even more so- it was not even clipped out, and contained only one Prince Valiant cartoon (of that day) and some other ones of other cartoons now long forgotten.  Disappointed, I placed it back into the book, but not before I took a snap of the advertisement on the back.

It being the Christmas season, I thought of the many people who "wanted" this, "needed" that, and in the same way, this advertisement for these once fancied products of the future have long become undesirable, worthless, tragic objects which may have lasted a little longer than a Hollywood marriage, but probably not much longer.