The Eldon Dedini Collection: Broccoli, Babes, and Everything Else

Abstract

Archival practice has traditionally overlooked the informational value that objects and ephemera can provide to documents; their usefulness is limited to being an exhibit item or novelty. This article discusses the challenges and opportunities found in the management of objects and ephemera found in a collection of a cartoonist's papers. Learning and adapting new perspectives about objects from related fields demonstrates that objects can also support and extend understanding of documents when kept together. The article concludes with a series of questions in order for an archivist to evaluate these items to recognize their value to documents within a collection.

KEYWORDS:

• appraisal
• artifacts
• documents
• Eldon Dedini
• ephemera
• papers of cartoonists
• three-dimensional objects

Notes

¹ Chris E. Makepeace, Ephemera: A Book on Its Collection, Conservation and Use (Brookfield, VT: Gower Publishing Company, 1985), 200.

² Ian Woodward's Understanding Material Culture (London: Sage Publications, 2007) is a good source for the examination into material culture studies.

³ Douglas Martin, “Eldon Dedini, 84, Magazine Gag Cartoonist, Dies” New York Times, January 14, 2006. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/14/arts/14dedini.html?_r = 0

⁴ The impact of a gag cartoon is dependent on a caption that explains the illustration; often the picture and caption are each meaningless on its own.

⁵ Lisa Crawford Watson, “Dedini Redux,” Monterey County Herald Go! Supplement, November 3–9, 2005, 3.

⁶ Anson Musselman, Dedini: A Life in Cartoons (DVD). Directed by Anson Musselman. 2005. Bundled with Eldon Dedini, An Orgy of Playboy's Eldon Dedini (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2006).

⁷ Irene Leon Masteller, “The World According to Eldon Dedini,” Monterey County Herald, September 29, 1991, 16.

⁸ Leah Garchik, “Dedini Saw All His Jokes Go to Other People,” San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle, August 10, 1980, 29.

⁹ This includes learning about the business side of magazine cartooning. In a 1991 interview from the Monterey County Herald (see Note 5) Dedini stated while he was under contract to The New Yorker and Playboy magazine, “only one out of every five cartoon ideas [is] actually published.” The large amount of material within the idea files also gave an understanding of the demands of the cartooning industry.

¹⁰ [Box 102/Lenin], Eldon Dedini Collection, The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.

¹¹ The “Duke of Del Monte” was a character Dedini designed as part of the logo for the renowned Del Monte Golf Course in Monterey, California. This character and logo is still used by the golf course today: http://www.pebblebeach.com/golf/del-monte-golf-course/membership.

¹² Hilary Jenkinson. A Manual of Archive Administration (London: Percy Lund, Humphries &Co, 1937), 11.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Richard Pearce-Moses, A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology, Archival Fundamentals Series. (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2005). Available at http://www2.archivists.org/glossary/terms/d/document

¹⁵ Ibid. Definition of “four-corners document” available at http://www2.archivists.org/glossary/terms/f/four-corners-document

¹⁶ Ibid. Definition of “document.”

¹⁷ Ibid. Definition of “realia” available at http://www2.archivists.org/glossary/terms/r/realia

¹⁸ Ibid. Definition of “artifact” available at http://www2.archivists.org/glossary/terms/a/artifact

¹⁹ Ibid. Definition of “ephemera” available at http://www2.archivists.org/glossary/terms/e/ephemera

²⁰ Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler, Preserving Archives and Manuscripts (Chicago: SAA, 1993), 111

²¹ Pam S. Hackbart-Dean and Elizabeth A. Slomba, How to Manage Processing in Archives and Special Collections (Chicago: SAA, 2012), 53.

²² Jill Robin Severn, “Adventures in the Third-Dimension: Re-envisioning the Place of Artifacts in Archives,” in An American Political Archives Reader, ed. Karen Dawley Paul et al. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009), 227.

²³ Morag Boyd and Jenny Robb, SPEC Kit 333: Art & Artifact Management, (Washington, DC: American Research Libraries, 2012), 13.

²⁴ Ibid., 17.

²⁵ Severn, “Adventures in the Third Dimension,” 223

²⁶ Gloria Meraz, “Cultural Evidence: On the Common Ground between Archivists and Museologists,” Provenance, Journal of the Society of Georgia Archivists 15 (1997): 23–24.

²⁷ Katie Rudolph, “Separated at Appraisal: Maintaining the Archival Bond between Archives Collections and Museum Objects,” Archival Issues 33, no.1 (2011): 25–39.

²⁸ Luciana Duranti, “The Archival Bond,” Archives and Museum Informatics 11 (1997): 213–218.

²⁹ Rudolph, “Separated at Appraisal,” 29.

³⁰ Hugh Taylor, “‘Heritage’ Revisited: Documents as Artifacts in the Context of Museums and Material Culture,” Archivaria 40 (Fall 1995): 8–20.

³¹ Lisa M. Givens and Lianne McTavish, “What's Old is New Again: the Reconvergence of Libraries, Archives, and Museums in the Digital Age.” The Library Quarterly 80, no.1 (January 2010), 8.