There is enjoyment when encountering a big, thick American scrapbook album from the 19th or early 20th centuries, bulging with ephemera and autograph or manuscript material.

As you open it up, glued in musical concert programs flap open. You see detailed ink or pencil captions identifying an albumen photograph or an original pencil drawing. A colorful handbill for a magic lantern show fills a page.

Anticipation. What else will you to find? Turning the scrapbook’s leaves, you see colorful images and neat, carefully designed arrays of all kinds of keepsakes and souvenirs tipped in over the course of many years.

Excellent examples of 19th century and early 20th century American scrapbook albums are not haphazard aggregations, but are those thoughtfully arranged, typically in chronological order.

They are called only scrapbooks because of the colorful small paper decorations or “scrap” sometimes glued onto their pages. “An actual person made this scrapbook,” we say, “it is not a mass-produced, generic souvenir.”

You can encounter all kinds of rare ephemera glued, tipped-in or loosely insert into American scrapbooks albums: programs, handbills, postcards, original drawings, dance cards, bookplates, flowers, tickets, and letters. We see carefully preserved baseball box scores, brochures, locks of hair, maps, silhouettes, photographs, mourning cards, autographs, labels. Found objects from nature:

It is tempting to see these ephemeral items in isolation, each item of historical ephemera an island unto itself. But when you study each American scrapbook in its whole – with all of its artifacts left in situ – you can learn not just about the individual ephemera, but about the people who created the scrapbook albums, their lives, their concerns.

Men, women, and children in nineteenth century  and early twentieth century America all kept scrapbook albums. Schools and businesses made them up too, kind of like institutional memory.

You can find scrapbook albums used for many purposes: social events attended, sports clubs, nursing students, vaudeville performers, teachers, corporate advertising departments, and theatrical and musical performances.

One particular type of Victorian scrapbook even depicts room settings with furniture. They are “furnished” with pictures of household objects glued to the pages like a two-dimensional doll house. Scrapbook albums thus show a range of creativity. They are often quite good sources of the biographical details of their creators, too.

Harry T. Hyndman of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, for example, was an outstanding student athlete. His scrapbook of historical ephemera is filled with all kinds of programs and newspaper clippings about his glory days at the University of Pennsylvania.

Hyndman subsequently served in an artillery company during the Spanish-American War. So how did he remember the war? He apparently remembered the saying that “an army travels on its stomach” and glued an official U. S. Army hardtack biscuit in his scrapbook album. He even went so far as to annotate this unlikely souvenir. Handwriting upon a piece of hardtack must have taken some skill!

Nineteenth century and early 20th century American scrapbook albums are vast depositories of information that preserve fleeting moments in time.

This is what we mean when we write about historical ephemera. We do not mean the trivial objects of memory, still images frozen in time. Rather, we engage scrapbook albums almost like a movie: one that visually documents complex experiences and representations of American history and the American experience.

For a good overview of Victorian-era scrapbook albums and the ephemera contained within them visit the web site of The Scrap Album. You’ll find numerous other links to library and museum collections of old scrapbook albums and vintage ephemera. The Ephemera Society of America is also an excellent resource to learn about the world of collecting ephemera.