EVOLUTION OF SCRAPBOOKING: IMPROVEMENTS IN TECHNOLOGY

 EVOLUTION OF SCRAPBOOKING: IMPROVEMENTS IN TECHNOLOGY

In 1826, the scrapbooking craze really took off with the publication of John Poole's 'Manuscript Gleanings and Literary Scrapbook while the year previous had seen the publication of a serial titled 'The Scrapbook' which defined a scrapbook as a blank book which held newspaper articles and pictures for preservation. The actual term 'scrapbook' had been coined just a few years earlier because of the bright pieces of paper left over from a printing job, or scrap, that people had begun to paste into their albums for decorative purposes.

Scrapbooks of this time period would have included calling cards, the decorated name cards men and women left at their friends' homes at the start of their visits or to indicate they had stopped by with the intention to visit, national advertising trade cards, religious cards with Biblical inscriptions, rewards of merit for good grades and good behavior for schoolchildren, and carte-de-visite photographs which are better known to us as postcards.

Surprisingly, one of the biggest supporters of scrapbooking during the late 1800s was the author Mark Twain! He loved the hobby so much that he devoted entire Sundays to the creation of his personal scrapbooks and even patented a series of scrapbooks in 1872 to be sold by Brentano's Literary Emporium in NYC as well as through the Montgomery Ward catalog. His scrapbooks contained alternating gummed and non-gummed pages with perforations on the non-gummed pages for easy removal. An article from the St. Louis Dispatch in June 1885 states that Twain made about $50,000 on his scrapbooks. In comparison, the sale of all his novels combined had netted him about $200,000.

The invention of photography, and its direct ancestors, obviously changed the art of scrapbooking forever as scrappers now had the means to capture scenes of their lives in a way that wasn't possible before with only printed media. Louis-Jacques Daguerre invented the daguerreotype in 1837, but it wasn't until 1839 that this process was made public, so the latter date is often given for the birth of photography. Others quickly refined and added to the evolution of photography with the invention of halftone plates and photo engraving in the last half of the nineteenth century until George Eastman marketed his Kodak camera and photographic rolled film in 1888 and completely revolutionized the entire photographic industry up to that point.

There was a sharp decline in scrapbook popularity around 1940 as photo albums were being mass produced and people began to focus on photography as a hobby, but luckily for us, the publication of Alex Haley's 'Roots,' a story which alleged to tell his family's history and autobiography back to eighteenth century Africa, in the mid-1970s as well as a surge in genealogical research gave rise to a renewed interest in scrapbooking and preserving family history in such a fashion.