Neither a book, nor a print or a medal, they are related to these three categories at the same time, which do not facilitate their classifying. Composed of a sheet of cardboard attached to a small wooden handle, measuring about forty centimeters in height, one call them “handscreens”, “fire screens” or “fixed fans”. Modestly priced, they were not designed to last. Most often anonymous, fragile and ephemeral by nature, these screens never gained the interest of French conservation institutions since very recently. Fortunately, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum’s Textiles Department in New York shelters today the richest and most outstanding public collection (as far as we know) of French XVIIIth Century Handscreens (about 30 pieces) ; the Winterthur Museum at Winterthur (Delaware) also keeps an interesting sample of these objects. Why should this small object be so important for academics, researchers and museum curators ? Because these French screens were to be found by dozens in all the living spaces of bourgeois and aristocratic residences in the old days, including the Court. They were used daily by men as well as by women, by adults as well as by children. New models of screens were sold every year in the hundreds by Parisian etchers. Their function was not only to protect the face from the heat of the fireplace of their users (a basic assignment) but also to educate or to entertain – sometime all in one – the person who held them at eye level. How ? Thanks to the various topics printed on both sides of the cardboard, often organized in series, like small portable encyclopedias, covering History, worldwide geography, architecture, news, literature, theater, music, songs and so on, while being elegant and fashionable. By apprehending these documents as historical sources, we discover a totally unrecognized way of dissemination of knowledge among the upper classes ; we penetrate the heart of sociability among affluent circles ; we find out an original point of view on the taste and on the preoccupations of the epoch in France, surely, and on an international scale too, as those cardboard screens spread in Europe where they were like modest ambassadors of the French “Art de vivre” which also turn to be then an “art de penser”. Our pictural paper, richly illustrated through a “Powerpoint” presentation, is stressing an interdisciplinary approach of these small objects, beyond material culture. We also raise several lateral questions : why have these screens been neglected by French institutions despite their deep and strong interest for scientific research, as well as for general public ? Why are decorative arts still systematically disregarded in France ? Why a researcher studying “small things” should not be serious ?