The title is Jessica’s perfect homage to “these people I didn’t know,” many of whose scrapbooks were actually titled Scrapbook. Scrapbooks is full of great images from scrapbooks past, immeasurably enriched with anecdotal and academic insights. The original scrapbook medium was totally analog, but for her ever-expanding project, Jessica has taken great advantage of the digital world – to scout for books, share her finds and findings, and even locate descendants to whom she can return scrapbooks when she’s done with them.
Whether you have Scrapbooks or not, Jessica’s on-line videos are an incredible treat. Her six-minute show-and-tell on uTube provides a superb overview. You can also watch a talk Jessica gave at the Cooper Hewitt this past Spring with Rebecca Johnson Melvin, a professional preservationist and ephemera curator. And the Amazon page for Scrapbooks includes three more short Jessica videos. For “vintage Jessica insights” on the contemporary scrapbooking phenomenon, her 2005 essay on Design Observer takes the teacake.
Because I am particularly interested in how people express their personalities on paper, I steered our conversation that way. Jessica’s big picture observations are pithy-perfect: “The ‘old’ scrapbooks used whatever was at hand – people didn’t buy new stuff for their scrapbooks. Making these visual records of their lives gave them pleasure, and when they wanted to stick things in, they did so without the ease of tape, which wasn’t invented until the late 1920s.” Here are a few other highlights for me:
JH on John Vowell’s calling card: This card fell out of a scrapbook, so I don’t know where it originally “went.” I love the idea that high school students had calling cards. They all said Mister or Miss, and as they all went to the same stationers, the typographic options were fairly limited. And there were certain common features: women, for example, rarely if ever displayed their addresses, which was considered common and, frankly, unladylike. For the record, I didn’t come across anything else like this humorous card in my research. {AK wonders whether Mr. Vowell’s career made use of his cleverness!}
JH on “decoding” a scrapbook: I read a scrapbook like an archeologist. I want to know who the person was who made it, or kept it, or lost it. Even though you might think a scrapbook is like a diary, it’s not – because scrapbooks tend to be really asynchronous: There was nothing to prevent people from going back and forth, adding, eliminating, reconsidering. So there are all these fascinating layers of paper — of life — in which the scrapbook maker’s personality is refracted through multiples lenses of cultural, visual, even culinary, and frequently gender-based mores. And the caption beneath a clipping or a photo may be more revealing than the visual would seem to suggest. And here’s what’s really fascinating: Over time and across multiple scrapbooks, you can sort of see this larger narrative emerging, a string of first-person stories seen as a collective tale of an entire world of people no longer here to speak for themselves. And to me, that’s simply riveting.
JH on scrapbooks as history: Historians are starting to look at these as valid historical records, which is interesting from the ephemera point of view. The biggest collection of baby books, for example, is at UCLA in the Medical Library. These are first-person accounts of the history of social hygiene – what mothers fed their babies, attitudes about breast feeding, and so on. Once you acquire a great deal of ephemera from a similar point of origin, you get a kind of critical mass of material, whereas seen individually, the evidence is charming and anecdotal, but not very deep.
JH on the context and magic of ephemera: To me, the value of collecting ephemera is precisely this: You find enough of it, and you’re rewarded with this vivid social history. You look, you think, you look again. You hold it in your hands and turn it over, inspecting the back of a postcard before 1907, when divided backs were introduced; you see the absence of a ZIP code, and names like Bertha, Florence or Minnie that evoke another time, another century. Paper ephemera, let’s not forget, is the ultimate oxymoron: If it is so ephemeral, why is it still here? And I know there are scores of people who collect it because it’s beautiful, which indeed it is. But once you look at it as social history, as physical evidence, as a portal into another time and place — well, to me, that’s when the magic happens.
Author photo: John Dolan
Alyson Kuhn, the editor of Felt & Wire, bought five old French calling cards to give a francophile friend two years ago. But she hasn’t been able to part with them yet. She has made them their own little envelope, which you may see here soon.
