CITY SCRAPBOOKING & KEEPSAKE DESIGNS Scrapbooking History & Backgrounder

City Scrapbooking & Keepsake Designs   
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CITY SCRAPBOOKING & KEEPSAKE DESIGNS
Scrapbooking History & Backgrounder

Anyone who keeps a scrapbook has something in common with celebrated American historical figures. Declaration of Independence author and founding father Thomas Jefferson, literary titan Mark Twain, and legendary pop art icon Andy Warhol, were all avid and voracious scrapbookers.

Throughout his life, Thomas Jefferson kept leather-bound volumes filled with news clippings, drawings, diary entries, dried leaves, and other memorabilia. Today Jefferson's albums are stored at his former home in Charlottesville, VA.

Mark Twain was such a fervent scrapbooker that he reserved entire Sundays for his hobby. In 1872, Twain patented and marketed his very own Patent Scrap Book, which was sold by Brentano's Literary Emporium at 39 Union Square in New York City. Twain's Patent Scrap Book was an improvement in scrapbooking because it had water-activated adhesive for adhering scraps.

Pop culture superstar Andy Warhol, who began collecting photographs and memorabilia during his childhood, labored endlessly over documenting every discriminate aspect of his life, culminating in 42 scrapbooks and more than 600 "Time Capsules."

Scrapbooks have long been used as a way to record personal histories and a form of artistic expression. The term "scrapbook" comes from the brightly colored paper called "scrap" that originally filled albums. Early scrapbooks were collections of brilliantly hued scraps of paper items, like advertising cards or greeting cards, arranged by subject or type of material and referred to as "common-place books" or "friendship albums." One big difference in the appearance of early scrapbooks is that they didn't have a lot of family photographs because cameras weren't widely available until 1888. Instead, people cut articles from newspapers and saved labels, greeting cards, and illustrations for their scrapbooks.

The earliest known reference to scrapbooking dates back more than four centuries to 1598, when an author is documented as having referred to gathering "words and approved phrases … to make use as it were a common place book [sic." By 1706, educated men and women were pasting quotes and phrases into "common-place" books after author John Locke, a philosopher, publishes his New Method of Making Common-place Books.

Modern scrapbooking – using acid-free paper, plastic and adhesive products – is documented to have gotten its start in 1980, when the Christensen family of Utah decided to share their 50 volumes of memory books with the crowds at the World Conference on Records. Reaction was so overwhelming that the family decided to write the first modern book detailing how to scrapbook, Keeping Memories Alive, and opened the first retail store of the same name selling only acid-free scrapbooking supplies.

Today, scrapbooking is the expressive art of safely and creatively showcasing photos and memorabilia in albums using acid-free paper products, adhesives and techniques. Pages are embellished with stamping, stickers, die-cuts, artwork and journaling. It has grown into a worldwide phenomenon called the "quilting of the ‘90s and ‘00s" by The Washington Post, and has been written about in Time Magazine and the Wall Street Journal. The industry has grown from a $350 million per year industry in 1998 to a more than $1.4 billion dollar per year industry in 2002, and is still growing exponentially.




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