This book explores the history of scrapbook-making, its origins, uses, changing forms and purposes as well as the human agents behind the books themselves. Scrapbooks bring pleasure in both the making and consuming - and are one of the most enduring yet simultaneously changing cultural forms of the last two centuries. Despite the popularity of scrapbooks, no one has placed them within historical traditions until now. This volume considers the makers, their artefacts, And The viewers within the context of American culture. The volume's contributors do not show the reader how to make scrapbooks or improve techniques but instead explore the curious history of what others have done in the past and why these splendid examples of material and visual culture have such a significant place in many households.

Men and women 150 years ago grappled with information overload by making scrapbooks-the ancestors of Google and blogging. From Abraham Lincoln to Susan B. Anthony, African American janitors to farmwomen, abolitionists to Confederates, people cut out and pasted down their reading. Writing with Scissors opens a new window into the feelings and thoughts of ordinary and extraordinary Americans. Like us, nineteenth-century readers spoke back to the media, and treasured what mattered to them. In this groundbreaking book, Ellen Gruber Garvey reveals a previously unexplored layer of American popular culture, where the proliferating cheap press touched the lives of activists and mourning parents, and all who yearned for a place in history. Scrapbook makers documented their feelings about momentous public events such as living through the Civil War, mediated through the newspapers. African Americans and women's rights activists collected, concentrated, and critiqued accounts from a press that they did not control to create "unwritten histories" in books they wrote with scissors. Whether scrapbook makers pasted their clippings into blank books, sermon collections, or the pre-gummed scrapbook that Mark Twain invented, they claimed ownership of their reading. They created their own democratic archives. Writing with Scissors argues that people have long had a strong personal relationship to media. Like newspaper editors who enthusiastically "scissorized" and reprinted attractive items from other newspapers, scrapbook makers passed their reading along to family and community. This book explains how their scrapbooks underlie our present-day ways of thinking about information, news, and what we do with it.

Lester's Legacy is inspired by a true story of Hollywood. Bette Bligh the stories main character was born and bred in Beverly Hills, Ca. She ultimately leaves wealth for poverty when she marries one the first abstract expressionists of the time in Venice, Ca. The secondary character in the book is Bette's son Monte who is orphaned at 9 years old, he does not discover his roots until he is a grown man by finding a manuscript penned by his father. After a bizarre odyssey he finds out why his father disappeared and other mysteries of his families past. It is truly a riches to rags story.

This focus issue of the journal examines case studies from the field of photographic preservation and collections management. Guest Editor, Olivia Arnone, provides a history and context for the eponymous program based at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY. Six amply-illustrated articles addressing this area of research follow.

As photography became an increasingly accessible medium in the twentieth century, the popularity of the photographic album exploded, yielding a wonderful range of objects made for varying purposesto memorialize, document (officially or unofficially), promote, or educate, and sometimes simply to channel creative energy. Photographic Memory: The Album in the Age of Photography traces the rise of the album from the turn of the century to the present day, showcasing some of the most important examples in the history of the medium, as collected by the Library of Congress. The albums that comprise Photographic Memory provide an immensely personal and idiosyncratic historical perspective through the many lenses of these unique objects. From an Alaskan expedition album of Edward Sheriff Curtiss early work, to Walker Evanss extended suite of images in study for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, to a family album by Danny Lyon, this beautifully produced book provides an in-depth look at the history of photography through the handmade objects of some its most famous practitioners, much of which is previously unpublished. The book includes works by photographers and filmmakers such as F. Holland Day, Jim Goldberg, Dorothea Lange, Duane Michals, Leni Riefenstahl, and W. Eugene Smith alongside lesser-known, yet significant albums on subjects as varied as African American vaudeville, the 1915 Jerusalem locust plague, and the folkways of Spain. Each album, beautifully reproduced over numerous spreads, is accompanied by a detailed explanatory text. An insightful history of the album format is included, as well as an informative essay about caring for and restoring albums. At a time when the physical collection of photographs is becoming largely immaterial through digital means, Photographic Memory is a comprehensive illustrated history of a form of presentation that became an art form in itselfa history that has seen radical shifts in the role of handmade artists objects.

For any library, archive, or historical society committed to getting materials back into circulation as quickly as possible, this reference offers a one-stop solution. From the issues relevant to directors to hands-on instructions for technicians, it's an excellent reference for the entire library.