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
Get a Closer Look at Scrapbooks
(click on images to )
Zelda Fitzgerald's Scrapbook 1000 Journals Project,
2000-present Harn Scrapbook, 1920s His Service Record, 1942;
USO Scrapbook; Victory Scrapbook, 1942 Kelley Scrapbook, 1927