Scrapbooks – a record of the times of our lives

As soon as I saw the tattered edges of the pages spilling from the old scrapbook, I knew instantly what it was. Not photos, but other mementos of someone’s life.

We all have them – papers, ribbons, pressed flowers, tickets, and even photos from some special trip or program or project that meant so much to us.

My trip to Italy some years ago produced tons of photos, tickets to museums, pamphlets on the Colosseum and other historical sites, postcards of Capri, the Catacombs, the Vatican. I was so taken with the ironwork balconies on buildings that I photographed them, too. A year’s fellowship at the University of Michigan had produced some of the same.

The cover of the scrapbook at auction was still in good shape, but some of the ephemera inside had lost their glue and slipped away, lost forever except for notations on the pages.

The contents of the book were so eclectic that they lacked any continuity or focus. They were a hodge-podge of disparate papers and other items, and the story they were trying to tell was muddy. The writing on the first page noted that the items came from a summer trip to Wildwood, NJ, in 1949. But there were also a ribbon from a Christmas gift, an engagement greeting card and a Salvation Army fund-raising card from 1951.

Today, scrapbooking is more than just gluing stuff to pages. It is an art – a fixing of photos, papers, fabric and just about anything else into a montage that tells a story or paints a picture. Its 18 million or so adherents take this hobby seriously – dishing out money for supplies, going on retreats to network and learn, designing new complicated projects and taking classes to learn even more.

And this is no quaint hobby. It is a billion-dollar industry that has been embraced by both brick-and-mortar and online retailers, bloggers and magazines: Walk into a Michael’s or A.C. Moore and you’ll find aisle after aisle of scrapbooking materials, or Google the word “scrapbook” and you’ll get millions of results, the first of which are companies selling products.

Some scrapbooks also are journals in which you can reveal your thoughts in much the same way many people once did with diaries. They can take all forms, depending on your interests, and can be digital as well as hard-copy. The young boy in the new movie “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” created what would be called a grief scrapbook that helped him get through the loss of his father on Sept. 11.

Although it seemed – to me, at least – that scrapbooking sprouted overnight, it apparently has been around in some form since the 15th century. The first were called commonplace books, which were primarily text of recipes, letters, poems and prayers. Later came friendship albums with personal writings and poems, along with musings and sentiments posted by friends.

Here are some scrapbooks in the archives of the Connecticut Historical Society of a man’s school days from 1892 to 1896, and menus and programs from a printing firm. The society’s blog noted some problems with these early books: brittle paper, dried tape and glue, yellow newspaper pages and their inability to tell us much of anything.

Some notable people were scrapbookers. Thomas Jefferson kept newspaper clippings of his presidency in an album, and pasted poems in a book for both himself and his granddaughters. One of his scrapbooks contained pages he clipped from various Bibles and has been dubbed the Jefferson Bible.

Mark Twain was said to have loved scrapbooks and always kept one with him. He patented a scrapbook in 1872 that had strips of glue on the page for easier mounting. The invention was financially fruitful for him.

Scrapbooking lost some of its luster during the 1940s when everyone with a camera took photos, and picture-taking became the nation’s hobby. It got back its wings in the 1970s when a Utah woman named Marielen Christensen began designing pages to better memorialize her family. She put together 50 volumes, and she and her husband in 1981 wrote a book showing others how to do it.

The thrill of scrapbooking doesn’t seem to be waning. But I wonder what’ll happen to all those wonderful projects in the future. Will they, too, end up on the auction table? Or will families see more value in them because they resemble works of art?