Price lists, commercial correspondence including letterhead, invoices, bills of lading, menus, playbills and tickets of various kinds all have a story to tell about the development of Britain in this period.
Scott mentions the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera at The University of Oxford Bodleian Library as a good source. Although there is a good catalogue at http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/johnson and a few examples of images online a much larger subset of the collection is available to institutional subscribers only through ProQuest.
Waiting for 49 years for my son to find the pleasure in genealogy, he not only now has the curiosity but the desire of learning more about his English roots. From the Ontario Thorne line he has found that Thorne relatives became major brewers of beer, a hobby he follows growing his own hops. So the talk about ephemera was most interesting, and the links to beer and breweries should turn up some images.
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