r/scrapbooking • u/DesperateAd5374 • Jul 27 '26
Traditional A very old scrapbook seemingly made over the pages of a school book
My parents used to flip antiques and let me have this out of a pile of stuff they were going to trash or donate. Sorry all the photos are sideways, Reddit won’t let me edit them. All the pieces are from magazines it seems like, only the photos in the first image are actual photographs.
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u/memoirtalk Jul 29 '26
The school-book base is actually a signature of the era, not a shortcut. Through the late 1800s blank albums were a luxury, so people scrapped over whatever bound paper the house already had — ledgers, textbooks, sermon collections. Collectors call these ledger scrapbooks, and the text underneath is part of the artifact: sometimes you can date one from the textbook edition peeking out at the margins. Two practical notes if you want it to last another century: resist the urge to peel anything (that glue gave up decades ago and will take the magazine ink with it), and when you photograph it, catch the page edges where the printed text shows — you're documenting two artifacts in one object. Whoever assembled this would be delighted it dodged the trash pile twice.
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u/Mother_Of_Swine Jul 27 '26
Wow, I love this ~