After a few decades of wide-eyed digital evangelism, even the web’s most fervent exponents are beginning to realize the “infinite repository” is not all it was cracked up to be.
Despite long-tailed promises of an immaculate aide-mémoire, the reality turns out to be spotty at best. Physical media, as predicted by Luddites and curmudgeons (ahem), turns out to be the better, possibly the best, way to preserve history. (To wit: While we can still read a complaint letter carved on a clay tablet by a disgruntled buyer 1,750 years before the birth of Christ, all traces of my first novel are confined to the inside of my own skull.) Thus the importance of ephemera of the sort being purveyed at the DeLand Paper, Postcard and Photo Fair:
With more than a million pieces of vintage paper on hand — postcards and photos, newspapers, comics, letters, ledgers, recipes, cards — history is pinned to a tangible reality that can’t be destroyed by a mere keystroke or a failure to vigilantly and continually update technology. (Paper and ink’s operating system hasn’t changed to the point of nonfunction even over millennia, unlike, say, a 2004 IBM ThinkPad.)
While the annual fair is rich in primary historical sources, it serves scrapbookers, collage artists and decorators just as happily as archivists. Please leave matchbooks and Big Gulps outside the exhibit hall doors.
10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 4; 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 5; Talton Exhibit Hall, Volusia County Fairgrounds, 3150 E. New York Ave., DeLand, $5.
Volusia County Fairgrounds
3150 E. New York Avenue, Deland, FL
813-949-7197
Subscribe to Orlando Weekly newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | or sign up for our RSS Feed
This article appears in Jan 1-7, 2025.
