Scrapbooks: An American History | 
 enlarge | Author: Jessica Helfand
Publisher: Yale University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $45.00
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Rating:  27 reviews
Sales Rank: 7841
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.9
Dimensions (in): 12.3 x 9.1 x 0.8
ISBN: 0300126352
Dewey Decimal Number: 709
EAN: 9780300126358
ASIN: 0300126352
Publication Date: November 3, 2008
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Amazon.com Review
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
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Product Description
Combining pictures, words, and a wealth of personal ephemera, scrapbook makers preserve on the pages of their books a moment, a day, or a lifetime. Highly subjective and rich in emotional content, the scrapbook is a unique and often quirky form of expression in which a person gathers and arranges meaningful materials to create a personal narrative. This lavishly illustrated book is the first to focus attention on the history of American scrapbooks—their origins, their makers, their diverse forms, the reasons for their popularity, and their place in American culture. Jessica Helfand, a graphic designer and scrapbook collector, examines the evolution of scrapbooks from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present, concentrating on the first half of the twentieth century. She includes color photographs from more than two hundred scrapbooks, some made by private individuals and others by the famous, including Zelda Fitzgerald, Lillian Hellman, Anne Sexton, Hilda Doolittle, and Carl Van Vechten. Scrapbooks, while generally made by amateurs, represent a striking and authoritative form of visual autobiography, Helfand finds, and when viewed collectively they offer a unique perspective on the changing pulses of American cultural life. Published with assistance from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund
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| Customer Reviews: Read 22 more reviews...
 Wonderful Book January 6, 2009
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Aside from being beautiful book, this unique and thorough contribution expands on the traditional definition of primary sources for the understanding American history.
Good to a point January 6, 2009
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
the author has found some charming old scrapbooks, including an amazing one covering the poet Anne Sexton's elopment. In general I'd describe the book as beautiful and fascinating. But for some reason that I hope to write her about, the author has no appreciation of present-day scrapbookers, which is really a pity. She strikes me as being overwhelmed by the number of products available for scrapbooking, and seems to have a gut reaction that if people are using "products" for scrapbooking, it can't be a good thing. But in fact I would argue that modern scrapbooking looks different from the kind Ms. Helfand likes because of very good things indeed, like a greater ambition and confidence on the part of scrapbookers today. So if you're a scrapbooker looking to trace the connection between what you do now and what was done in the past, this book will, I'm sorry to say, disappoint you.
Keeping it Real, page-by-page January 5, 2009
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I was given this book as a holiday gift, by a fellow artist, and it is delightful. The author's obvious love of her subject shines through, as the reader is allowed to peer over her shoulder and view a grouping of unique, distinctive and heartfelt personal archives. Each scrapbook is a private view of a life that was made more meaningful by the practice of collecting and saving small bits of paper, souveniers, photos and ephemera. Most of the books have the un-self-conscious intimacy of private visual journals. The hand-written inscriptions and at-times inexplicable clippings and carefully-saved what-nots create a mood of unmistakeable pathos. As one who keeps visual art journals, and has written books on this topic ("Artists Journals & Sketchbooks"), I felt this book added significantly to my thoughts about why people need the emotional outlet of hand-made archives to express their innermost thoughts.
The curiosity of a collector December 29, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Jessica Helfand cannot help herself. She is drawn inexplicably to particular objects without reasoning why--at least at first. In her 2002 "Reinventing the Wheel", it was the information wheel that caught her eye in flea markets, secondhand shops and online buyers' markets (i.e. Ebay) over and over again. What drew her to them? In the beginning it was an amusement, but her mind wouldn't rest there. Her curiosity led to her to question the history and meaning of these primitive interactive designs, and deliver an exquisite book full of unlikely associations, brilliant narrative, and social history. And now she's done it again with "Scrapbooks: An American History." Helfand's inquisitive nature has drawn her (and us) into the fascinating lives of dozens of people who opted to chronicle their experiences with the detritus of life: cigarette butts, candy wrappers, theatre tickets, photos, scribblings, whatever they found memorable and meaningful; the littlest things that brought their lives into focus for themselves, and ultimately for us. How Helfand manages to weave a thread, to tell a story, thru all the scrapbooks she has collected, is the most astonishing aspect to me.
Almost a vanished art form December 25, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book is just like the scrapbooks it features: it's very beautiful, it's a great read, and it's historically relevant. You shouldn't hesitate to buy it just for that. But I love that it shows a form of the art that is in danger of being eclipsed; a sole strong voice emerging from just a blank book, nothing more. The term scrapbooking means something else now. Think of the equivalent to this book when historians one day assess modern scrapbooking the way Ms. Helfand has done for early scrapbooks. The scrapbooking industry provides such a wonderful and satisfying experience for many people, but it also creates quite an artistic din from all the guidance it provides. Later generations will marvel not at how the sole voice was heard because of modern scrapbooking, but at what it took for the voice to be heard above it. These are two forms of the scrapbook art and the distinction is meaningful. Seeing distinctions makes all artists better. I think the book would be inspiring to keepers of scrapbooks of all kinds.
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