THE CHARLOTTE LAROY PAPER NAPKIN COLLECTION

 

When Charlotte LaRoy was in elementary school, she had a quiet revelation.

Paper napkins are beautiful.

It was the 1940s, she was the daughter of a federal food-safety scientist, and she was just discovering the spectacular variety of face-and-finger wipes.

That early fascination seeded what over decades would become a paper napkin collection worth preserving. LaRoy kept sliding new finds into a blanket box under her bed — until, some years ago, she finally walked into the Library of Virginia. LaRoy handed them over, more than 1,100 in all, surprising and delighting curators. They are now being preserved in perpetuity alongside documents from the Founding Fathers and tomes dating to the 15th century.

LaRoy built a collection that is head-shaking in its scope, from the elegant to the everyday, offering an intimate view into the life of one woman and a remarkable window into decades of American history and social change.

There's a cartoonish and menacing series of espionage warnings on napkins from the Pentagon. Some date back to the 1950s Red Scare era. "Keep classified information to yourself, pardner!" reads one with a stubbly-faced cowboy.

By nature of the medium, there's also an outsize trove from bars, many of which embody the ribald humor and casual sexism of their time. One features a bare-backed woman at a washboard and the words "The Ideal Wife."

There are jolly Christmas scenes, advertisements for extinct airlines and country music lyrics. There is a fan-shaped one, rectangular ones and some that unfold to a bigger canvas.

When LaRoy contacted Dale Neighbors, the visual studies collection coordinator at the Library of Virginia, about her collection in 2017, he wondered: Who on earth would save such a stockpile?

"I don't know what to do with them anymore," he recalled her saying.

Then LaRoy brought them in.

Neighbors knows the power of what curators call "ephemera," which one expert, Maurice Rickards, defined as the "minor transient documents of everyday life." That can be everything from tea bag tags and fruit crate labels to report cards and razor blade wrappers. When he was a curator at the New York Historical Society, Neighbors used ephemera to help director Martin Scorsese's production team make sets for the films "The Age of Innocence" and "Gangs of New York" appear as authentic as possible.

 

To read the complete article, see:
Espionage, sexism and memories in one woman's epic napkin collection (https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/12/27/paper-napkin-collection-virginia/)

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