Scrapbooks: An American History (review)

Scrapbooks are the bane of archival processes, conservation practices, and of librarians in general, as the books bulge grossly with acidic tape, material objects, and loose pages. For the cultural historian, scrapbooks represent, in their unregulated messiness, a mountain of interpretative challenges. The creators of scrapbooks disordered the world around them and reordered it on the pages of their own book; relied upon commercial sources for books and scraps while assembling what look to be monuments of folk expression; hint at artistic creativity while insisting upon amateur status. These polarities are, of course, suspect as theoretical frameworks unless used as continuums of valuation, rather than oppositional categories.

Helfand's volume on scrapbooks struggles mightily with these challenges of interpretation, and while at times Helfand succeeds at illuminating the social and historical contexts for scrapbooks, it will take a more traditional scholar to provide us with a full-length study of the phenomenon. The organization of the book is roughly thematic but themes such as "Time," "Space," and "Nostalgia" are under-developed and inconsistently applied. Change over time as an analytical approach is dispensed with overtly, since, the author argues, scrapbooks themselves resist chronological arrangement. However, more historically-grounded scholarship of recent years has demonstrated that scrapbooks have a distinct and traceable history framed in other literary practices and influenced directly by technological changes. There is a casual slippage of terminology (and hence, categories), such as the equation of collecting (an activity) with scrapbooks (specifically referred to as a category of objects) in the preface, and later in the same section, biography and autobiography are both used to describe scrapbooks as statements of self.

These criticisms reflect scholarly, historical issues that I have with the book. The volume is a gorgeous monument to the idiosyncratic beauty of scrapbooks dating from the mid-1800s to late 1990s. Helfand, partner in a prominent graphic design firm Winter-house and co-editor of the influential blog Design Observer, has produced an extremely beautiful book. The extended horizontal format of the volume reflects the commitment to reproducing layouts of the scrapbooks. The full-color images are of very high quality, photographed and cropped with attention to detail, and reproduced with a uniformly lush texture so that the pages appear remarkably as if the actual scrapbook pages. This focus on the aesthetic qualities of the volume reflects Helfand's own self-professed subjective approach, and is a cue for readers interested in a careful weighing of historical evidence that they may not be on the same page as the author. Don't hate this book because it is beautiful; accept it for what it is. Helfand presents readers with an object of beauty that describes the beauty of those overlooked scrapbooks that only appear homely. Readers may not be persuaded by any historical or cultural arguments that Helfand presents; that work is better accomplished by recent or forthcoming scholarly works on scrapbooks.