I frequently visit the site Design Observer for news and reviews on design– I highly recommend it.  Jessica Helfand is one of the people behind the scenes at Design Observer and she has both undergrad and grad degrees in Graphic Design from Yale.  So I assumed any book she was involved in would be worth looking at.  And here is one such book: Scrapbooks: An American History.

Helfand chose to show a limited number of scrapbooks that date from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  Each scrapbook is a unique and cohesive collection that is highly personal. One scrapbook was started by a 19 year old who eloped.  She collected all kinds of ephemera from her honeymoon, including a telegram from her parents responding to news of their daughter’s marriage [they took it very well].  Another scrapbook was devoted to scraps of fabric, each stained with a different substance. Each swatch is accompanied by a description of the stain and what the scrapbooker used to remove it.

What I like best about this book is that it makes the contents of fragile old scrapbooks accessable and it reveres the intent of early scrapbook makers.  I don’t think that modern scrapbooking has the same sense of preservation, and more focus may now be on the display of information rather than the information itself.

The only thing I didn’t particularly like was the heavy-handed use of graphic-designy introductions to each chapter.  Helfand laid out the pages in bright red and gives the weight and dimensions of the scrapbook.  To my eyes it’s a tired old layout, showing a product on a grid with dimensions in a quasi-commerical, design-jargonny way.  It’s so far afield of the contents of the book I’d rather not see it at all or have it somehow reference the content in some way.  [I'm not a graphic designer, but I do have some sense of design and my own personal taste.  Sorry, this really bent me out of shape.]

This book is great.  Go take a look for yourself, and leave plenty of time to get totally wrapped up in it.