A symposium co-sponsored by Winterthur Museum and Country Estate and The Library Company of Philadelphia will consider numerous genres of printed ephemera, tracing their origins in Europe, their transit to American shores and further development in this country.

“Ephemera Across the Atlantic: Popular Print Culture in Two Worlds” takes place September 15-17. The slate of speakers includes scholars from Germany, Great Britain, Sweden and Canada, as well as the United States.

“The invention of printing in the Fifteenth Century revolutionized the way people communicated and created a ‘print culture’ producing everything from scholarly books with the finest illustrations to the broadsides and chapbooks of popular and folk culture,” said Don Yoder, professor emeritus of folklife studies and religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Much printed material consisted of transitory documents of everyday life, produced in small print shops and circulated to local communities,” Yoder continued. “This printed ‘ephemera,’ often discarded after use, included pictorial prints, advertising flyers, membership certificates, songs and ballads, broadside announcements and tickets. The ephemeral nature of these items, however, belies their importance, as they often provide the only surviving evidence illuminating for us the roles that religion, medicine, politics, military activities and entertainment played in lives in the past.”

The first day of the symposium will take place at Winterthur, Route 52. The following day’s activities will be at the Library Company of Philadelphia, 1314 Locust Street. Register by September 1 to guarantee a space.

For information or to register, www.librarycompany.org or 215-546-3181, or www.winterthur.org or 302-888-4600.