This paper is a presentation of selected materials from the Department of Manuscripts of the Polish Academy of Sciences, deposited by the creators of the coastal student culture of the period of the Polish People’s Republic (PRL). The author indended it as a contribution to the considerations on the concept of “ephemerality” in three dimensions: ephemerality of the content of manuscripts, ephemerality of information carriers, ephemerality in accordance with the traditional definition of ephemeral prints. The value of theater artefacts as source materials is emphasized, allowing to determine the periodization of the history of separate student theaters, the artistic expression of students from the State College of Fine Arts in Gdańsk and demonstrating the features of the communist era as a time of shortage economy, poor-quality products. Those included typescripts from the 1950s and 1960s (the poor make of which made it difficult to read the notation of the scenes), the scrip or the list of theatrical props. Due to their non-institutional nature and short duration, the theaters of the PRL period are often referred to as ephemera. The article therefore aims to answer to the question of what ephemera-theaters and their socio-historical context say about leaflets and manuscripts.