Scrapbooking
Scrapbooking is a method of preserving, presenting, and arranging personal and family history in the form of a book, box, or card. Typical memorabilia include photographs, printed media, and artwork. Scrapbook albums are often decorated and frequently contain extensive journal entries or written descriptions. Scrapbooking can also be incorporated into therapy and can help individuals cope with trauma or grief. Scrapbooking started in the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century.
History
In the 15th century, commonplace books, popular in England, emerged as a way to compile information that included recipes, quotations, letters, poems, and more. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator's particular interests. Friendship albums became popular in the 16th century. These albums were used much like modern day yearbooks, where friends or patrons would enter their names, titles and short texts or illustrations at the request of the album's owner. These albums were often created as souvenirs of European tours and would contain local memorabilia including coats of arms or works of art commissioned by local artisans. Starting in 1570, it became fashionable to incorporate colored plates depicting popular scenes such as Venetian costumes or Carnival scenes. These provided affordable options as compared to original works and, as such, these plates were not sold to commemorate or document a specific event, but specifically as embellishments for albums. In 1775, James Granger published a history of England with several blank pages at the end of the book. The pages were designed to allow the book's owner to personalize the book with their own memorabilia. The practice of pasting engravings, lithographs, and other illustrations into books, or even taking the books apart, inserting new matter, and rebinding them, became known as extra-illustrating or grangerizing.Additionally, friendship albums, confession albums, and school yearbooks afforded girls in the 18th and 19th centuries an outlet through which to share their literary skills, and allowed girls an opportunity to document their own personalized historical record previously not readily available to them. In "Negotiating Intimacy in British Romantic Friendship Albums," Renee Bryzik has analyzed five albums from the Pfozheimer archive at the New York Public Library that illustrate the practice's range in style and content.
For example, college women around the turn of the century used scrapbooks extensively to construct representations of their everyday life as students. Without photograph albums to provide images of these life events, students created unique representations through scrapbooks in order to illustrate their lives using ephemera and memorabilia. A guest list or group of visiting cards might represent a young woman's visit to a party. A playbill and ticket stub might serve as reminders of a trip to New York to see a Broadway show. Solid objects such as plants, silverware, or small trinkets were also used when further visual representation was needed. A page from these subject-based scrapbooks might include class schedules, exam booklets, letters from professors, or other printed material from school events. Thus scrapbooks from this era can create a more complete image of their maker's life.
During the 19th century, scrapbooking was seen as a more involved way to preserve one's experiences than journaling or other writing-based forms of logging. Printed material such as cheap newspapers, visiting cards, playbills, and pamphlets circulated widely during the 19th century and often became the primary components of peoples’ scrapbooks. The growing volume of ephemera of this kind, parallel to the growth of industrialized society, created a demand for methods of cataloguing and preserving them. This is why scrapbooks devoted solely to cataloguing recipes, coupons, or other lists were also common during this time. Until later in the 19th century, scrapbooks were seen as functional as well as aesthetically pleasing. Several factors, including marketing strategies and technological advancement, contributed to the image of scrapbooking moving further toward the aesthetic plane over the years.
The advent of modern photography began with the first permanent photograph created by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826. This allowed the average person to begin to incorporate photographs into their scrapbooks. However, books or albums made specifically for showcasing photographs alone were not popularized in the United States until closer to 1860. Before that point, photographs were not thought of as items to be reproduced and shared. Demand for photo albums was spurred on in large part by the growing popularity of the carte de visite, a small photograph distributed in the same manner one might a visiting card.
Old scrapbooks tended to have photos mounted with photo-mounting 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. An early known American scrapbooker and inventor of scrapbooking supplies was Mark Twain. Twain carried scrapbooks on his travels as he collected souvenirs, clippings, and pictures. Various individuals and communities created scrapbooks throughout the twentieth century in Britain. Among the most ardent scrapbookers of the 18th century was William Henry Dorsey, an artist who collected documents, paintings and artifact pertaining to Black history. Dorsey compiled hundreds of scrapbooks on the lives of Black people during the 18th century and built a collection that he laid out in his home in Philadelphia.
Modern scrapbooking
In modern scrapbooking, the concept of preservation has become more apparent as scrapbookers now make these creations not prioritizing their audience anymore but themselves. Shaping their personal narratives by selecting the memories they consider meaningful, scrapbooking has developed a new meaning to both the scrapbooker and to the next generation. Through this intentional choice-making, scrapbookers create memorials that give significance to everyday experiences that might otherwise be forgotten. Rather than only scrapbooking the eye-catching or aesthetically pleasing photos, memory keepers get to choose which experiences are "scrapworthy" to them and how they want to be remembered in their family history which moves away from the traditional scrapbooking norms. In other words, scrapbooks are inherently selective; they are never a complete portrayal of what life was for a person, but instead a story that the scrapbookers chooses to tell, making scrapbooking no different from storytelling. Through this process, children and future generations come to understand that what is preserved in a scrapbook reflects what the scrapbooker values as significant or worth remembering.Modern scrapbooks are shaped through the scrapbooker’s perspective. Being able to choose which events they want their life to be defined as and which ones to leave out, the intentional incompleteness that modern scrapbooking emphasizes aligns scrapbooks with other autobiographical forms.
Marielen Wadley Christensen, of Elk Ridge, Utah, United States is credited with turning scrapbooking from what was once just the ages-old hobby into the actual industry containing businesses devoted specifically to the manufacturing and sale of scrapbooking supplies. 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. In 1981 Marielen and her husband Anthony Jay authored and published a how-to booklet, Keeping Memories Alive, and opened a scrapbook store in Spanish Fork that ended up with the same name, that remains open today.
Following the lead of Keeping Memories Alive, many other stores have popped up and cater to the scrapbooking community. Besides Keeping Memories Alive, these include companies such as Creative Memories, Making Memories, Stampin' Up!, and Close to My Heart.
According to Google Trends, the search terms related to scrapbook and scrapbooking have seen a 70 percent decline since its peak in 2005–2006. However, there is much debate among the community of people who engage in memory keeping about what the decline means for the health and future of the industry as a whole. However, if one takes a closer look, it is easy to see all the ways people continue memory keeping even if it does not fall strictly within the definition of traditional scrapbooking as defined here.
Alternatives to Scrapbooking
Some examples include the advent of Smash books created by EK Success, which in some ways, are a closer representation to original scrapbooks in that they are wire bound books in a variety of sizes consisting of blank printed background papers into which one can journal and glue mementos.Another variation is the introduction and growth of pocket scrapbooking, most well-known and represented by Project Life created and introduced by Becky Higgins. Higgins created the system in response to her personal desire to continue record the lives of her children and family, but in a quicker, more simple way that allowed her the flexibility to complete the project, but still in an attractive, cohesive way.
One of the newest trends into scrapbooking is bringing the layout designs down to a much smaller size. Small enough to carry in a small bag with on the go updates and area for creativity and memory keeping. A traditional traveler's notebook is a simple leather cover with a band to keep closed. The cover can hold up to six inserts which can be used in many ways. The notebook has grown in popularity, allowing for journaling and memory keeping for any interests.
Mini albums are another great way of memory keeping and a new trend in scrapbooking. They can be made in different sizes based on the number of photos to be put inside the album. These mini albums can be constructed and hand made from scratch.