The Early History of Scrapbooking

Scrapbooking has a very interesting history. It is a part of literary history and dates back all the way to 1598. This posting will explain the earliest history of scrapbooking. The information provided below was gathered from the scrapbooking organization “Pages of the Heart”.

The earliest forms of scrapbooks dates back to the philosophical, religious, and rhetorical discussions of Aristotle and Cicero and their pupils. Scrapbooks then became popular during the Renaissance period. During this time, there was an overflow of culture and information that needed a place to be stored. As libraries and philosophical schools became more popular, many literary-minded people copied poems and other passages that had moved them into blank books.

In 1706, the philosopher John Locke focused much attention on the commonplace book in his 'New Method of Making Common-place Books' manual. His book taught the proper technique for the preservation of proverbs, quotations, ideas, speeches, and other forms of written or spoken word. This paved the way for the modern day idea of journaling.

In 1769, 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 were the most direct predecessors to the scrapbooks we are familiar with today.

Thomas Jefferson was one of the first well-known American scrappers. He saved newspaper clippings from and during his presidency and put them 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.

The albums we are familiar with today came into existence in the early 1800s. 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.

This concludes this post about the history of scrapbooking. There will be more on the modern day history in later posts.