BEGINNINGS OF SCRAPBOOKING: THE EARLIEST HISTORY

BEGINNINGS OF SCRAPBOOKING: THE EARLIEST HISTORY

The earliest known reference to what we would now call a scrapbook is from 1598, but the use of notebooks to collect information started much earlier during the time of Aristotle and Cicero. These men, and their pupils, used this earliest form of the scrapbook for philosophical, religious, and rhetorical discussions. The word 'album,' in fact, comes from Greco-Roman times when a praetor's public notices were recorded on paper tablets or white tables.

During the Renaissance, which took place between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the soon-to-be termed commonplace book came into its own as the period's overflow of information and culture needed a place to reside. An intense renewal of popularity in the study of Greek and Roman culture as well as the rise of libraries and philosophical schools such as Humanism provided the perfect opportunity for the creation of commonplace books as scholars and other literary-minded people copied their favorite passages or poems into blank books to create personal anthologies of works that had inspired or touched them.

In addition, Giorgio Vasari, an Italian author in the sixteenth century, advocated in his book of Italian artists the saving of prints and drawings by placing them in albums, a recommendation that influenced the creation of museums and libraries during that time period and a practice that continued to be popular in Europe up until the 1900s. The philosopher John Locke focused enough attention on the commonplace book in his 'New Method of Making Common-place Books' manual, published in 1706, to create a new and separate genre. His book discussed the proper technique for the preservation of proverbs, quotations, ideas, speeches, and other forms of written or spoken word that paved the way for the modern day idea of journaling.

In 1769, one of the direct predecessors to our modern day scrapbook was created when William Granger published a history of England with extra illustrations of his text as an appendix. Later, he expanded on his idea by including blank pages which readers could use to add in their own illustrations or prints as desired. This process, known as grangerizing, came to mean any book that was rebound into a different edition with new additional prints, letters, or other memorabilia. These types of books were also known as extra-illustrated books and achieved the most popularity during the 1800s.

Our third president, Thomas Jefferson, was one of the first well-known American scrappers, in a manner of speaking, as he saved newspaper clippings from and during his presidency into a series of albums for future reference. Other people during this time period saved notes, news articles and other clippings, illustrations, craft instructions, and even diary entries into homemade albums with wallpaper and cardboard covers. Some folks who could afford to 'waste' books in their collections actually pasted their ephemera, printed paper memorabilia like tickets or playbills,    

onto old book or catalog pages.By the early 1800s, albums had evolved into ones resembling those of today with embossed covers, engraved clasps, and locks. Along with Granger books and commonplace books, people in the 1800s kept diaries, journals, and friendship albums. Friendship albums were almost exclusively owned by women and kept a lady's favorite quotes, poems, calling cards, and hair weavings in one place. Hair weavings, which started in Germany, were intricate weavings of pressed ribbons and flowers into a friend's cut strands of hair to display in an album along with a poem or remembrance of that friend