Graf Zeppelin and Charles Lindbergh ephemera. (My interest proves ephemeral.)

A couple of weeks ago, I was gazing The New Yorker, when an auction house ad caught my eye.

Graf Zeppelin and Charles Lindbergh ephemera. Now there’s a nice market, I thought.

And then, of course, I started wondering about just what that ephemera might be.

First, were they talking about Graf Zeppelin, the German count who invented the eponymous dirigible, or Graf Zeppelin the dirigible. What with Charles Lindbergh being an actual human being, it could have meant ephemera associated with the Graf himself. What with Charles Lindbergh being associated with aviation, it could have meant the dirigible.

When I first looked, the Clars auction house site provided scant information, since they didn’t yet have the Graf Zeppelin and Charles Lindbergh ephemera online. The closest ephemera I could find was some “crash-damaged aviator goggles” that had belonged to Amelia Earhart, worn during her very first crash, while learning to fly under the guidance of one Neta Snook. (They don’t make names like they used to.) The goggles sold for $17,775, which sort of goggles the mind, doesn’t it.

Amelia’s goggles (and Neta’s name) aside, my appetite for ephemera – especially Graf Zeppelin ephemera – was whetted, so I began hunting around for more.

Harmerschau had a bit from the collection of “Clara Adams Famous First Flight Passenger.” And here we were thinking that the Kardashians were the first folks to be famous for being famous. Why, here was Clara Adams, famous for being a first flight passenger. Which, admittedly, is more fame-worthy than getting married for 72 days so you’d have a recurring topic for your “reality” show.

Anyway, among her “wonderful pieces of aviation history,” there was available for the bidding a “piece of Graf Zeppelin skin.” Given that other items in the collection included the Graf Zeppelin South America flight passenger handbook, I’m going with that “skin” being Graf Zeppelin the dirigible skin, not Graf Zeppelin the human skin. But, hey, you never know.

Then I found a Hermann Goering’s Zeppelin cigarette box, going for $6,500, “with enameled swastika tail fins” listed as an “attractive display item.”

Am I the only one who questions whether memorabilia associated with a Nazi leader can never really make an “attractive display item”?

By this point, I wasn’t even sure what auction house I was looking at, but there  does seem to be quite a bit of Nazi-related junk out there for the asking/bidding. Including a double wine bottle holder from Goering’s private railway car with “plum darkened patina around the eagle/swastika/DR”, and a silverware place setting that belonged to von Ribbentrop.

Let me tell you, you can spend as much crazy-time wandering around auction sites as you can roaming around eBay trying to figure out what you could get for your vintage Tiny Tears doll if, alas, Tiny were still among the living.

But I hung tight, knowing that, eventually – since the auction is this coming weekend – Clars would have to open up about just what Graf Zeppelin and Charles Lindbergh ephemera they would have on offer.

For Lucky Lindy, it was mostly – yawn – some photographic plates. And a medal worn by someone in the Cleveland Committee that honored Lindbergh. (Wider yawn.) For the Graf Zeppelin, it was just a postcard of the Hindenburg and an original photo of the Hindenburg going up in flames. Oh, the humanity! Which, for crying out loud, you can get on Wikipedia for free. The picture, not the humanity. And, by the way, the Graf Zeppelin and the Hindenburg were two separate dirigibles, not one and the same. (Put that in your Hermann Goering cigarette case and smoke it.)

With so little Graf Zeppelin and Charles Lindbergh ephemera available, I decided to cancel my plan  to spend Sunday bidding on the Clars auction. Not that there wasn’t plenty of other interesting stuff available. Would that I had the habitat or the pocketbook for this extraordinarily cool modern couch.

But honestly, drawn in as I was by that ad for Zepp and Lindy ephemera, I was hoping for more than a postcard of a blimp and a medal worn by someone who went to a dinner at which Lindbergh was honored. Maybe Lindy’s goggles. Or a medal awarded to him, perhaps by the Nazis, to mesh a couple of themes together.

Sometimes ephemera just ain’t what it’s cracked up to be.