Postcards, cocktail stirrers, stickers and sugar packets: These are the incidental objects that punctuate our lives. Momentarily useful and quickly forgotten, their designs are rooted fundamentally in the present; they are mass produced for brief use before being replaced with the new and the next. 

It is little surprise that collectors find the very idea of this impermanence appealing. The richly textured variations of these cheap and disposable ephemera offer an honest insight into the whims and fancies of a specific time and conjure a shadowy image of previous owners. It follows that even the most ordinary objects can become charged with new meaning if a famous artist or writer—someone who has spent their life creating their own mythology—once possessed them.

Take the widely re...