Scraps of time: Old scrapbooks present preservation challenges

You might think of scrapbooking as a modern pastime, and, certainly, it is. According to the Craft and Hobby Association, scrapbooking and memory crafts account for the largest chunk of the craft industry today, racking up more than $2.4 million in retail sales in 2006.

But scrapbooks have actually been around for a long time. The idea of using albums to preserve important data even dates back to Greek and Roman times.

The precursors of today's modern scrapbooks were commonplace books, which became popular in the 17th century as repositories of favorite sayings and words of wisdom, says Deborah Wender, director of book conservation at the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover, Mass.

Wender was in Salt Lake City recently to conduct a workshop on scrapbook preservation for professional conservators from libraries and archives around the state. She talked about the history of scrapbooks — and the challenges they present for preservation, both to institutions and at home.

The big problem, she said, is that as scrapbooks became popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, they were naturally put together with available materials. But those materials were not necessarily made to last.

Commonplace books were often compiled just in notebooks, frequently made of brown wood-pulp paper. That kind of paper was considered high-tech in those days, but it doesn't hold up all that well, said Wender.

The first commercially manufactured scrapbooks came along in the 19th century, fueled by a surge of interest in compiling albums. That surge was brought about by a number of things, she said. The Industrial Revolution led to new printing processes, including color printing. Photography became more accessible. But equally important was the fact that "rail travel was more available, and a growing middle class had more money and leisure time for travel. They brought home scraps from their trips, and the idea was to put them in albums so you could sit and look through them with your friend," Wender said.

By midcentury, she said, "we start to see more mass-produced albums and books. There are patented page attachments and structures. A lot of experimenting going on."

In 1873, Mark Twain patented a scrapbook that featured lines of moisture-sensitive adhesive. "Use but little moisture and only on the gummed lines," he advised. "Press the scrap on without wetting it." Twain apparently made $50,000 from these scrapbooks, which were sold through Daniel Slote and Co. However, if the pages happened to get wet, they stuck together in a big mess.