Great American Scrapbook

Great American Scrapbook

We leave clues. Some are inadvertent. Some are intentional. Some revelatory. Others are insignificant

For at least 100 years, Americans have glued, taped, pasted and sewn many of those clues into scrapbooks. What they reveal — and conceal — about their owners is a story Falls Village designer Jessica Helfand tells in " Scrapbooks: An American History" (Yale University Press, $45).

"It occurred to me then that reading biographies never gives you the incredible, vivid rush that you get when holding actual letters in your hand — the postmarks, the pictures, the handwriting, the photos, the errors, the scribbles," Helfand, 48, says. "It's all so deliriously human."

Scrapbooks, Helfand writes, served as an emotional ordering of the trivial and the profound. Combining the impulse to collect, to self-narrate and to affirm, scrapbooks are both the residue of an individual and the artifacts of a civilization.

Scrapbooks, whose heyday Helfand defines as from 1900 to 1935, form a kind of visual folktale — reminding us that the trivial isn't always useless and that the common is invariably uncommon.

Despite their long popularity, "Scrapbooks" is the first book to focus close attention on the history of American scrapbooks — their origins, their makers, their diverse forms, the reasons for their popularity and their place in American cultural life. The intoxicating book, which includes more than 450 full color images, examines the scrapbooks of the ordinary and extraordinary, the celebrated and notorious and finds in them stirring human connections.

"Throughout this book, it's people grabbing what is there on their kitchen table and making sense of it," Helfand, who is a partner at Winterhouse design firm, and a senior critic at Yale University School of Art. "They grabbed gum wrappers and wrote about what was going on in their lives."

Helfand's interest in scrapbooking is a grand philosophical leap from her Yale days when the "neutral international language" was the lingua franca of the cognoscenti. In contrast, the scrapbooks that excited Helfand were those whose slapdash ordinariness was beautiful — the piece of peanut affixed to one page or the shard of a shovel to another. "It's an instant mnemonic device," says Helfand. "There is a fear that life moves very quickly. And you steel yourself against time moving quickly."

That, Helfand says, is likely why scrapbooks become particularly popular after traumatic cultural events, such as the Civil War, after which the scrapbook was largely created, or World Wars I and II. Helfand dates the more recent increase in scrapbooking to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

"You could recognize in another person's scrapbook something you saw in your own life," says Helfand, who has looked at hundreds of scrapbooks compiled during the last 200 years. "These are universal things we all go through. You can't not look at a woman describing the birth of her first child and not see some aspect of humanity. By looking at other people's lives, I learned a lot about my own. It's humbling."

That humility would be welcome news to the hundreds of modern scrapbookers who blitzed Helfand with hundreds of e-mails three years ago when she wrote a scathing indictment of what she considered the sterility and uniformity of modern scrapbooks. After that blog entry was posted, Helfand said, "I was vilified by the scrapbookers. And the part of me that's a mother, a sister and a daughter felt really bad."

Also intrigued. Helfand wanted to get a closer look at how — and why — people kept these visual records, and how they changed over time.

"It's the decorative ornamental object that I really have an interest in," says Helfand, one of the country's leading designers, who has worked with The New Yorker magazine, filmmaker Errol Morris, Yale University, and American Masters/PBS, among others.

The scrapbook is perhaps the most mongrelized form of autobiography. It is part photo album, part diary, part cultural library, part romantic novel. Helfand's history contains color photographs from more than 200 scrapbooks; some made by private individuals and others by the famous, including: Zelda Fitzgerald, Lillian Hellman, Anne Sexton, Hilda Doolittle and Carl Van Vechten.

Helfand found most of the scrapbooks through the on-line auction site eBay. She then devised a list of five criteria the scrapbooks had to meet (See box). And she continued, in detective-cum-historian fashion, by researching census and ancestral records to find out to whom these scrapbooks belonged. "It's forensics. It's sociology. It's art history. It's genealogy. You try to figure out: Is it real or disingenuous?"

Who, in other words, were these people?

There was Charlotte Christine Dobbs, of Marietta, Ga., who annotated a scrapbook full of material from her wedding gown and traveling suit, from her 1916 wedding. Or Teresa Viele's scrupulous recording of her scandalous divorce, which including accusations of adultery, insanity and cruelty. Or Jessie Southard Parker, a 16-year-old living in Belmont, Mass., just before World War I. The 1912 scrapbook contains ephemera from receipts, poems, family crests, ink drawings, calling cards, deed and Bible records — but not a single mention of the sinking of the Titanic, which happened in April of that year.

Yet another 16-year-old girl was obsessed with the 1932 kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. She pasted a newspaper photograph of the baby's shoes on the opposite page, in which she outlines the family tree and imagines herself in the Lindbergh's plight.

What is striking, of course, is the negative space of scrapbooks; what's omitted is nearly as significant as what's included. So, for instance, the scrapbook of Frederick G. Nixon-Nirdlinger, a theater manager from Philadelphia, who recorded his 1909 grand tour from western Europe to Egypt and Greece in a lavish scrapbook. The stunningly appointed scrapbook includes ticket stubs, Moorish lace, receipts of the purchase of a helmet in Gibraltar, graphically scintillating menus from Continental motels — and virtually no mention of his wife of 18 years, who accompanied him on the tour.

That reason for the omission becomes clear in Helfand's narrative, which explains that Nixon-Nirdlinger divorced his wife soon after the trip, took up with the fetching Charlotte Nash, 20 years his junior, moved to Paris and sired two children by her before his beautiful wife fatally shot him in the neck in their home on the French Riviera.

(Nash was acquitted by a jury of seven bachelors, but the real surprise was that Nixon-Nirdlinger had written her out of the will. All the money went to his two children.)

"All of this happens and yet his scrapbook reveals none of the emotional turbulence that must have preceded his imminent divorce," Helfand says incredulously.

But that, of course, is part of the self-narrative dimension of scrapbooks. Just as it is unclear whether they are public or private, it is equally obscure whether they are intended for full disclosure or simply to record celebratory moments. Sociologists talk about "willful episodic time" as the human tendency to skip from social celebration to social celebration when recording their lives.

And yet scrapbooks reveal that discomfiting moments are also recorded. One Southern teenager records an act of fellatio she observed on a street corner in 1922 — this in a scrapbook that otherwise recorded school dances, invitations and dance cards.

It's that dissonance and the continual juxtapositions of scrapbooks that intrigue Helfand. "Why Rudolph Valentino next to a prayer card?" she asks rhetorically. "You have to read these things like a road map."

Still, Helfand can't bring herself to warm to the "Michael's Crafts" store-bought embellishments of today's scrapbooks, which she describes as "at once playfully juvenile and strategically shrewd, steeped in memory yet inextricably bound to materiality, and seemingly devoid of any critical editorial conceit." She continues:

"Scrapbooks today tend to be overstuffed and all-inclusive — precisely the antithesis of what we have come to think of as modern. Just as the vernacular of the 21st century embraces the everyday with blind exuberance, so too does it unwittingly reinforce the value of just about everything. And yet, in a culture that celebrates the everyman (think Reality TV) and glorifies the banal (think blogs), the scrapbook takes on renewed value: everyone's opinion matters, and everyone's every waking move is important."

Nevertheless, Helfand has begun her own "scratch book," of quips, sketches and the bon mots of her two young children.

"I find it is the best therapy," Helfand said.

Republican-American news services contributed to this report.
Source: BY TRACEY O'SHAUGHNESSY REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN

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Modern Day Scrapbooking. Hobby Of Scrapbooking

Modern Day Scrapbooking

Marielen Christensen of Spanish Fork, Utah is often credited with reviving interest in scrapbooking in the United States. She began designing creative pages for her family's photo memories, inserting the completed pages into sheet protectors collected in 3-ring binders. By 1980, she had assembled over fifty volumes and was invited to display them at the World Conference on Records in Salt Lake City. Marielen and her husband AJ authored and published a how-to book, Keeping Memories Alive, and opened a scrapbook store in 1981 that remains open today.

In addition to preserving memories, the hobby is popular for the strong social network that scrapbooking can provide. Hobbyists, known as "scrappers" or "scrapbookers," get together and scrapbook at each other's homes, local scrapbook stores[5], scrapbooking conventions, retreat centers, and even on cruises. The attendees share tips and ideas as well as enjoying a social outlet. The term "crop," a reference to cropping or trimming printed photographs, was coined to describe these events.

In the late 1990s, many scrappers in the US opened stores to turn their hobby into a business. Within approximately 5 years, many of those stores were forced to close due to a downturn in the economy and the fact that many store owners mistakenly assumed that loving to scrap was enough to run a retail store. Many owners simply didn't know how to run their stores. During this time, more multi-level direct sales companies were formed. Several were closed due to mismanagement, while others weathered the tough times. It also gave rise to a new breed of business - the home-based retailer. Companies arrived to provide information for individuals who wanted to break out of the direct sales mold and go out on their own. While vendors had traditionally stayed away from the home-based market due to fraud, they began to warm to the idea of the non-traditional sales channels as a way to get their products in front of more consumers through home parties and workshops. Working with a company like this enabled them to tap into legitimate home-based retailers.

The scrapbooking industry doubled in size between 2001 and 2004 to $2.5 billion with over 1,600 companies creating scrapbooking products by 2003[4]. Creative Memories, a home-based retailer of scrapbooking supplies founded in 1987, saw $425 million in retail sales in 2004. This hobby has in the US surpassed golf in popularity: one in four households has someone playing golf; one in three has someone involved in scrapbooking.

Scrapbooking History

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.