Scrapbooks: An American History
Combining pictures, words, and a wealth of personal ephemera, scrapbook makers preserve on the pages of their books a moment, a day, or a lifetime. Highly subjective and rich in emotional content, the scrapbook is a unique and often quirky form of expression in which a person gathers and arranges meaningful materials to create a personal narrative. This lavishly illustrated book is the first to focus attention on the history of American scrapbooks—their origins, their makers, their diverse forms, the reasons for their popularity, and their place in American culture.
Jessica Helfand, a graphic designer and scrapbook collector, examines the evolution of scrapbooks from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present, concentrating on the first half of the twentieth century. She includes color photographs from more than two hundred scrapbooks, some made by private individuals and others by the famous, including Zelda Fitzgerald, Lillian Hellman, Anne Sexton, Hilda Doolittle, and Carl Van Vechten. Scrapbooks, while generally made by amateurs, represent a striking and authoritative form of visual autobiography, Helfand finds, and when viewed collectively they offer a unique perspective on the changing pulses of American cultural life.
Published with assistance from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund
Product Details
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, November 2008: The scrapbook has long been a popular and vital form of self-expression embraced by a cross-section of American society. "To read another person's scrapbook" observes Jessica Helfand in Scrapbooks: An American History, "is to acquire a body of knowledge about an entirely different time and place." Helfand--a prominent graphic designer, art critic, and author--has combined her considerable talents to create one of the most interesting and category-defying books on American culture this year. Through some 200 albums dating from the Victorian era through the present day--albums that Helfand personally curated and researched--Scrapbooks tells the story of ordinary and extraordinary lives, innovative visual ideas, and social change within the larger context of American history. The perfectly presented color photographs of album pages and schematic renderings draw readers right in. And, Helfand's detailed, yet evocative interpretations will keep them glued to the page. Scrapbooks is a special book that engages readers with a palpable sense of the material qualities of historic scrapbooks, and provides a stimulating presentation of the complex social and cultural worlds out of which they emerged. Like any first-rate scrapbook, Scrapbooks is a treasure-trove worth poring over for hours and hours. --Lauren Nemroff
The first book on the history of the American scrapbook. Discover untold stories in America's cultural history through nearly 200 fascinating scrapbooks.
Author Jessica Helfand Describes the Scrapbooks Project
Rich or poor, celebrity or civilian, men, women, and children of all ages kept scrapbooks. Some were ornate, with gilded covers and carefully composed pages of decoupage. Others were retrofitted from secondhand books, with chromolithographs glued sloppily on top of existing texts. Many consisted entirely of clippings, rigorously aligned and chronologically arranged, often around a central theme—pigeons, for instance, or movie stars or, not infrequently, obituaries. There were scrapbooks filled with babies, birds, and baseball statistics; scrapbooks about ice skating, dog breeding, and the intricacies of boy watching. Fragments of cloth from wedding gowns were included in bridal books, while new mothers included gentle locks from their baby’s first haircut. Debutantes saved news clippings, farmers saved weather reports, high school girls saved gum wrappers, and everyone, it seemed, saved greeting cards. Even soldiers kept scrapbooks, pasting in furlough requests, ration cards, and the tattered, beloved photos of their faraway sweethearts. Clumsily folded, haphazardly pasted, randomly annotated with fascinating afterthoughts, the material presence of these personal repositories offers a long-overlooked glimpse into the American spirit. Why did people feel compelled to save the things they did? What did they value, and question, and believe about themselves and the world around them? And how did the things they saved express what they themselves, for whatever reason, could not say in words?Over time, the scrapbook came to mirror the changing pulse of American cultural life—a life of episodic moments, randomly reflected in a news clipping or a silhouetted photograph, a lock of baby hair or a Western Union telegram. As a genre unto themselves, scrapbooks represent a fascinating, yet virtually unexplored visual vernacular, a world of makeshift means and primitive methods, of gestural madness and unruly visions, of piety and poetry and a million private plagiarisms. As author, editor, photographer, curator, and inevitable protagonist, the scrapbook maker engaged in what seems today, in retrospect, a comparatively crude exercise in graphic design. Combining pictures, words, and a wealth of personal ephemera, the resulting works represent amateur yet stunningly authoritative examples of a particular strain of visual autobiography, a genre rich in emotional, pictorial, and sensory detail. --Jessica Helfand
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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Scrapbooks were the original open-source technology, says graphic designer Helfand, who teaches at Yale, in this appreciative and analytical tour through a century's worth of visual historical record books. This eclectic, yet inclusive genre provide[s] a cross section of the range and pluralism of more than a century of modern American experience. The scrapbook compiles artifacts that illustrate their times, ranging from photographs of Rita Hayworth to ration cards, yet also render psychological portraits of their makers, whether young Victorian school girls, the mother of F. Scott Fitzgerald or WWII soldiers. A scrapbook's historical lessons can be gleaned by studying its content, form, commentary and even the wear of included items, and its intended viewers. Tracing the evolution of the scrapbook from a documentary record through manifestation of fantasy to nostalgic rendering or compendium of loved things, Helfand roughly sketches American history through creating her own scrapbook of scrapbooks. This book is colored at times by her privileging of older forms, which she sees as more personal and authentic expressions than the products of today's craft-oriented scrapbookers. But like any good scrapbook, this is a personal collage of a collective experience. (Nov.)
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From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Caroline Preston Afew months ago, I wandered into Michael's craft superstore in search of a poster board for my son's school project and found myself lost in the jumbo "Scrapbooking" section. Four aisles were devoted to colored albums, patterned pages, glues, stickers and letter stencils to document every holiday and human activity from baby's first step to enlistment in the Marines. There was a section of Martha Stewart supplies in uber-tasteful shades like bisque and sage green. It turns out that "scrapbooking" is not only a verb but also a multi-billion dollar industry. "Scrappers" are a clannish group with their own social rituals: weekend workshops, "scrap-and-spa" retreats and "cropping cruises." But America's love affair with the scrapbook is hardly new. In Scrapbooks, Jessica Helfand, a graphic designer and critic at Yale University School of Art, explores the 200-year history of the scrapbook, which she describes as an idiosyncratic form of visual biography. One of the earliest scrappers was Thomas Jefferson, who assembled volumes of poems and songs. Frustrated with dried-out glue pots, Mark Twain patented a self-pasting scrapbook that earned him $50,000, more than most of his novels. During the golden age of scrapbooks in the early 20th century, there were scrapbooks tailored for debutantes, brides, soldiers, movie-star fans, high school girls and automobile enthusiasts. Heavy and oblong, with over 400 color illustrations that range in size from full-page to postage-stamp, Scrapbooks has the heft and eye appeal of an ornate scrapbook. Helfand found a wacky assortment of stuff glued in scrapbooks that goes well beyond the usual clippings and photographs: locks of hair, twigs, cigarette butts, dance cards, candy wrappers, ration cards, a coonskin tail, a smashed watch and even the top of someone's blister. Helfand explains that she chose scrapbooks that, above all, "tell a story worth telling." Take, for example, the one kept by a 19-year-old girl who eloped from her Boston home. On one page is a faded color photograph of the achingly young couple lounging on beach chairs with the caption "us," along with the taped-in key to their Virginia Beach hotel room. Two pages later comes a telegram from her forgiving parents: "Two such sweet young people should make a fine combination." The young bride pastes in laundry lists, gin rummy tallies, her husband's apology note after their first fight. She also starts to write poetry: romantic rhyming couplets and letters, ripped from a magazine, that spell "Bleat, Bleat." The sunny scrapbook belonged to Anne Sexton, years before she found fame as a poet, her marriage imploded in abuse and infidelity, and she committed suicide. The prime example of the Jazz Age scrapbook is Zelda Fitzgerald's, which mirrored "the volatile rhythm of life between 1917 and 1926." Her pages, with drawings and photos of boys and high-jinx pasted in -- and in some case violently torn out -- have an "almost Dada-esque quality," says Helfand. The "incomplete, fragmented nature of scraps" seemed the perfect medium to capture the turmoil of the quintessential new woman, who was "essentially dwarfed by her husband's career." But most of the scrapbook authors in this book are not celebrities; in fact, we know little more about many of them than the chock-a-block scrapbook they left behind, which recorded the heyday of an otherwise ordinary life. Christine Dobbs from Marietta, Ga., pasted down every flower, love letter and dress-fabric swatch from her wedding. Francis Johnson of Waterbury, Conn., kept an elegant scrapbook of his service with the Second Air Force in China and Burma. When he died divorced and childless 40 years later, this precious keepsake was discarded; it turned up on eBay. Helfand's inclusive attitude towards a populist art form falls short in her last chapter. She finds today's prepackaged scrapbook supplies "homogenized and culturally neutral" and the final products "primitive by objective standards." "Veiled by embellishments, drenched in die cuts and ribbons, won't scrapbooks all look alike?" she asks. Probably not. Scrapbook keepers, as we have learned in this sumptuous book, tend to ignore prescribed formulas and create their own stories, original and true.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Customer Reviews
Pasting our American history to the page 
The rise of scrapbooking as a hobby has its roots deep in American history. Men and women of all walks of life have engaged in the practice, though the original intent and focus has changed over the last century and a half. Helfand is a designer, writer and cultural critic. She also is a collector of vintage scrapbooks. Here she combines both interests, using the many scrapbooks from her collection to explore American history and culture through the lens of what was considered interesting enough or important enough to collect within them.
This is a beautiful collection of over 200 scrapbooks, and hundreds of photographs, with contents ranging from the mundane (pictures and mementos of family) to news articles of the day, ticket stubs, money and greeting cards. These books come from the time before ready-made pages, laser printers and cropping parties - some made on the pages of books on hand, with the articles glued or taped over the published pages. Some of the names involved in scrapbooking are interesting in and of themselves - Mark Twain was a scrap-booker and Zelda Fitzgerald kept a scrapbook which Helfand includes. Here, scrapbooks are shown to be as much a part of American culture as quilting, and just as unique in design.
For those of us too lazy to do it ourselves
This is marvelous: An entire book of other people's scrapbooks. It's like having one's own scrapbook, but with the excitement of discovering exactly what it is one has done.
I deducted a star for not enough pictures of cute animals. Needs more kitties.
bits
A gorgeous quirky entertaining book, rich in strange and wonderful human narratives with vivid pictures and a captivating layout. A perfect gift.
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