Scrapbooking History
Scrapbooking is a method for preserving personal and family history in the form of photographs, printed media, and memorabilia contained in decorated albums, or scrapbooks. The idea of keeping printed materials of personal interest probably dates to shortly after the invention of printing. This trend is probably similar for photographs. Historically, scrapbooking was a tradition similar to storytelling, but with a visual and tactile, rather than oral, focus.
In ancient Greece hypomnemata were a form of notebook for recording one's own copies of what one had heard, read, or thought that might be worth remembering. There is little evidence in the archaeological and historical record that this practice was undertaken anywhere else previously. That one had to make one's own hand-written copies of what someone else had written reflected the expense of hiring a scribe to do so. More recently commonplace books reflected the same practice. Only with the availability of abundant printed material is it likely that the content of such books shifted away from one's own hand-writing or drawings or those of one's family members toward commercially available printed material.
Scrapbooking in its earliest form was a way to blend ephemera, memorabilia collections and journaling.[citation needed] People have been scrapbooking since printed material became available to the average person. Some of the earliest and most famous American scrapbookers include Thomas Jefferson and Mark Twain
Scrapbooking with photographs has been around since photos became available to ordinary people. Old scrapbooks tended to have photos mounted with photomount corners and perhaps notations of who was in a photo or where and when it was taken. They often included bits of memorabilia like newspaper clippings, letters, etc. Modern scrapbooking has evolved into creating attractive displays of photos, text, journaling and memorabilia.
I. BEGINNINGS OF SCRAPBOOKING: THE EARLIEST HISTORY
The earliest known reference to what we would now call a scrapbook is from 1598, but the use of notebooks to collect information started much earlier during the time of Aristotle and Cicero. These men, and their pupils, used this earliest form of the scrapbook for philosophical, religious, and rhetorical discussions. The word 'album,' in fact, comes from Greco-Roman times when a praetor's public notices were recorded on paper tablets or white tables.
During the Renaissance, which took place between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the soon-to-be termed commonplace book came into its own as the period's overflow of information and culture needed a place to reside. An intense renewal of popularity in the study of Greek and Roman culture as well as the rise of libraries and philosophical schools such as Humanism provided the perfect opportunity for the creation of commonplace books as scholars and other literary-minded people copied their favorite passages or poems into blank books to create personal anthologies of works that had inspired or touched them.
In addition, Giorgio Vasari, an Italian author in the sixteenth century, advocated in his book of Italian artists the saving of prints and drawings by placing them in albums, a recommendation that influenced the creation of museums and libraries during that time period and a practice that continued to be popular in Europe up until the 1900s. The philosopher John Locke focused enough attention on the commonplace book in his 'New Method of Making Common-place Books' manual, published in 1706, to create a new and separate genre. His book discussed the proper technique for the preservation of proverbs, quotations, ideas, speeches, and other forms of written or spoken word that paved the way for the modern day idea of journaling.
In 1769, one of the direct predecessors to our modern day scrapbook was created when William Granger published a history of England with extra illustrations of his text as an appendix. Later, he expanded on his idea by including blank pages which readers could use to add in their own illustrations or prints as desired. This process, known as grangerizing, came to mean any book that was rebound into a different edition with new additional prints, letters, or other memorabilia. These types of books were also known as extra-illustrated books and achieved the most popularity during the 1800s.
Our third president, Thomas Jefferson, was one of the first well-known American scrappers, in a manner of speaking, as he saved newspaper clippings from and during his presidency into a series of albums for future reference. Other people during this time period saved notes, news articles and other clippings, illustrations, craft instructions, and even diary entries into homemade albums with wallpaper and cardboard covers. Some folks who could afford to 'waste' books in their collections actually pasted their ephemera, printed paper memorabilia like tickets or playbills, onto old book or catalog pages.
By the early 1800s, albums had evolved into ones resembling those of today with embossed covers, engraved clasps, and locks. Along with Granger books and commonplace books, people in the 1800s kept diaries, journals, and friendship albums. Friendship albums were almost exclusively owned by women and kept a lady's favorite quotes, poems, calling cards, and hair weavings in one place. Hair weavings, which started in Germany, were intricate weavings of pressed ribbons and flowers into a friend's cut strands of hair to display in an album along with a poem or remembrance of that friend.
II. EVOLUTION OF SCRAPBOOKING: IMPROVEMENTS IN TECHNOLOGY
In 1826, the scrapbooking craze really took off with the publication of John Poole's 'Manuscript Gleanings and Literary Scrapbook while the year previous had seen the publication of a serial titled 'The Scrapbook' which defined a scrapbook as a blank book which held newspaper articles and pictures for preservation. The actual term 'scrapbook' had been coined just a few years earlier because of the bright pieces of paper left over from a printing job, or scrap, that people had begun to paste into their albums for decorative purposes.
Scrapbooks of this time period would have included calling cards, the decorated name cards men and women left at their friends' homes at the start of their visits or to indicate they had stopped by with the intention to visit, national advertising trade cards, religious cards with Biblical inscriptions, rewards of merit for good grades and good behavior for schoolchildren, and carte-de-visite photographs which are better known to us as postcards.
Surprisingly, one of the biggest supporters of scrapbooking during the late 1800s was the author Mark Twain! He loved the hobby so much that he devoted entire Sundays to the creation of his personal scrapbooks and even patented a series of scrapbooks in 1872 to be sold by Brentano's Literary Emporium in NYC as well as through the Montgomery Ward catalog. His scrapbooks contained alternating gummed and non-gummed pages with perforations on the non-gummed pages for easy removal. An article from the St. Louis Dispatch in June 1885 states that Twain made about $50,000 on his scrapbooks. In comparison, the sale of all his novels combined had netted him about $200,000.
The invention of photography, and its direct ancestors, obviously changed the art of scrapbooking forever as scrappers now had the means to capture scenes of their lives in a way that wasn't possible before with only printed media. Louis-Jacques Daguerre invented the daguerreotype in 1837, but it wasn't until 1839 that this process was made public, so the latter date is often given for the birth of photography. Others quickly refined and added to the evolution of photography with the invention of halftone plates and photo engraving in the last half of the nineteenth century until George Eastman marketed his Kodak camera and photographic rolled film in 1888 and completely revolutionized the entire photographic industry up to that point.
There was a sharp decline in scrapbook popularity around 1940 as photo albums were being mass produced and people began to focus on photography as a hobby, but luckily for us, the publication of Alex Haley's 'Roots,' a story which alleged to tell his family's history and autobiography back to eighteenth century Africa, in the mid-1970s as well as a surge in genealogical research gave rise to a renewed interest in scrapbooking and preserving family history in such a fashion.
In ancient Greece hypomnemata were a form of notebook for recording one's own copies of what one had heard, read, or thought that might be worth remembering. There is little evidence in the archaeological and historical record that this practice was undertaken anywhere else previously. That one had to make one's own hand-written copies of what someone else had written reflected the expense of hiring a scribe to do so. More recently commonplace books reflected the same practice. Only with the availability of abundant printed material is it likely that the content of such books shifted away from one's own hand-writing or drawings or those of one's family members toward commercially available printed material.
Scrapbooking in its earliest form was a way to blend ephemera, memorabilia collections and journaling.[citation needed] People have been scrapbooking since printed material became available to the average person. Some of the earliest and most famous American scrapbookers include Thomas Jefferson and Mark Twain
Scrapbooking with photographs has been around since photos became available to ordinary people. Old scrapbooks tended to have photos mounted with photomount corners and perhaps notations of who was in a photo or where and when it was taken. They often included bits of memorabilia like newspaper clippings, letters, etc. Modern scrapbooking has evolved into creating attractive displays of photos, text, journaling and memorabilia.
I. BEGINNINGS OF SCRAPBOOKING: THE EARLIEST HISTORY
The earliest known reference to what we would now call a scrapbook is from 1598, but the use of notebooks to collect information started much earlier during the time of Aristotle and Cicero. These men, and their pupils, used this earliest form of the scrapbook for philosophical, religious, and rhetorical discussions. The word 'album,' in fact, comes from Greco-Roman times when a praetor's public notices were recorded on paper tablets or white tables.
During the Renaissance, which took place between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the soon-to-be termed commonplace book came into its own as the period's overflow of information and culture needed a place to reside. An intense renewal of popularity in the study of Greek and Roman culture as well as the rise of libraries and philosophical schools such as Humanism provided the perfect opportunity for the creation of commonplace books as scholars and other literary-minded people copied their favorite passages or poems into blank books to create personal anthologies of works that had inspired or touched them.
In addition, Giorgio Vasari, an Italian author in the sixteenth century, advocated in his book of Italian artists the saving of prints and drawings by placing them in albums, a recommendation that influenced the creation of museums and libraries during that time period and a practice that continued to be popular in Europe up until the 1900s. The philosopher John Locke focused enough attention on the commonplace book in his 'New Method of Making Common-place Books' manual, published in 1706, to create a new and separate genre. His book discussed the proper technique for the preservation of proverbs, quotations, ideas, speeches, and other forms of written or spoken word that paved the way for the modern day idea of journaling.
In 1769, one of the direct predecessors to our modern day scrapbook was created when William Granger published a history of England with extra illustrations of his text as an appendix. Later, he expanded on his idea by including blank pages which readers could use to add in their own illustrations or prints as desired. This process, known as grangerizing, came to mean any book that was rebound into a different edition with new additional prints, letters, or other memorabilia. These types of books were also known as extra-illustrated books and achieved the most popularity during the 1800s.
Our third president, Thomas Jefferson, was one of the first well-known American scrappers, in a manner of speaking, as he saved newspaper clippings from and during his presidency into a series of albums for future reference. Other people during this time period saved notes, news articles and other clippings, illustrations, craft instructions, and even diary entries into homemade albums with wallpaper and cardboard covers. Some folks who could afford to 'waste' books in their collections actually pasted their ephemera, printed paper memorabilia like tickets or playbills, onto old book or catalog pages.
By the early 1800s, albums had evolved into ones resembling those of today with embossed covers, engraved clasps, and locks. Along with Granger books and commonplace books, people in the 1800s kept diaries, journals, and friendship albums. Friendship albums were almost exclusively owned by women and kept a lady's favorite quotes, poems, calling cards, and hair weavings in one place. Hair weavings, which started in Germany, were intricate weavings of pressed ribbons and flowers into a friend's cut strands of hair to display in an album along with a poem or remembrance of that friend.
II. EVOLUTION OF SCRAPBOOKING: IMPROVEMENTS IN TECHNOLOGY
In 1826, the scrapbooking craze really took off with the publication of John Poole's 'Manuscript Gleanings and Literary Scrapbook while the year previous had seen the publication of a serial titled 'The Scrapbook' which defined a scrapbook as a blank book which held newspaper articles and pictures for preservation. The actual term 'scrapbook' had been coined just a few years earlier because of the bright pieces of paper left over from a printing job, or scrap, that people had begun to paste into their albums for decorative purposes.
Scrapbooks of this time period would have included calling cards, the decorated name cards men and women left at their friends' homes at the start of their visits or to indicate they had stopped by with the intention to visit, national advertising trade cards, religious cards with Biblical inscriptions, rewards of merit for good grades and good behavior for schoolchildren, and carte-de-visite photographs which are better known to us as postcards.
Surprisingly, one of the biggest supporters of scrapbooking during the late 1800s was the author Mark Twain! He loved the hobby so much that he devoted entire Sundays to the creation of his personal scrapbooks and even patented a series of scrapbooks in 1872 to be sold by Brentano's Literary Emporium in NYC as well as through the Montgomery Ward catalog. His scrapbooks contained alternating gummed and non-gummed pages with perforations on the non-gummed pages for easy removal. An article from the St. Louis Dispatch in June 1885 states that Twain made about $50,000 on his scrapbooks. In comparison, the sale of all his novels combined had netted him about $200,000.
The invention of photography, and its direct ancestors, obviously changed the art of scrapbooking forever as scrappers now had the means to capture scenes of their lives in a way that wasn't possible before with only printed media. Louis-Jacques Daguerre invented the daguerreotype in 1837, but it wasn't until 1839 that this process was made public, so the latter date is often given for the birth of photography. Others quickly refined and added to the evolution of photography with the invention of halftone plates and photo engraving in the last half of the nineteenth century until George Eastman marketed his Kodak camera and photographic rolled film in 1888 and completely revolutionized the entire photographic industry up to that point.
There was a sharp decline in scrapbook popularity around 1940 as photo albums were being mass produced and people began to focus on photography as a hobby, but luckily for us, the publication of Alex Haley's 'Roots,' a story which alleged to tell his family's history and autobiography back to eighteenth century Africa, in the mid-1970s as well as a surge in genealogical research gave rise to a renewed interest in scrapbooking and preserving family history in such a fashion.
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