Artistic and archaeological heritage of the Abbey of Montserrat
Monday, 5 October de 2026
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Ephemera, A. Mucha and G. Camps

The term Printed Ephemera encompasses small printed items that accompany people's daily lives, sometimes from birth to death, with their respective announcements and remembrance cards, but also leisure activities, such as dance cards, menus, hotel or travel printed matter, postcards of all kinds, collectible trade cards, cigar bands, etc. Scholars of art and art sociology did not attach importance to this genre of printed material until the 1970s. In 1975 Maurice Rickards founded the Ephemera Society of London, and similar societies soon emerged in the USA, Australia, Canada, and other European countries. In Catalonia, Eliseu Trenc Ballester published the book Las artes gráficas de la época modernista en Barcelona in 1977, aiming to encourage the preservation and highlight the value of these modest forms of applied art, small in format but “great in their artistic quality and sociological value”.

Mrs. Carme Carreras-Candi i Mercader, daughter of the renowned historian Francesc Carreras-Candi, collected from her childhood postcards, holy cards, and other printed items that she considered interesting for their historical and cultural worth, in addition to their aesthetic value. The immense collection of Carme Carreras-Candi comprises around 30,000 pieces of all kinds and varying value, but it contains items of extraordinary worth that are hard to find in other similar collections. Mrs. Carme Carreras-Candi donated her entire collection to the Museum of Montserrat in 1982.

In April 2016, the Museum of Montserrat launched a small exhibition space where the most relevant works from this bequest will be displayed periodically, a selection of which we offer to you in this section of the Museum's website.