International Scrapbooking Industry Day

What the day is

International Scrapbooking Industry Day is observed on March 4. The hobby is older and stranger than the craft-shop aisle suggests.

Origin and background

Its ancestor is the commonplace book, a personal compilation of quotations, recipes, remedies and observations kept by educated readers from the sixteenth century onward. John Locke published a method for indexing one. Friendship albums and Victorian scrapbooks followed, the latter filled with the mass-produced chromolithographed images sold specifically for the purpose and actually called scraps.

Mark Twain has the best claim on the industry. He patented a self-pasting scrapbook in 1873, with pages pre-coated in dried gum that the user moistened, removing the mess of paste. It sold extremely well, and by some accounts earned him more than several of his books did.

The practical substance of the day is archival, and it matters more than the decoration. Most paper made since the mid-nineteenth century is wood pulp containing lignin and residual acid, which yellows and embrittles over decades and, worse, migrates into anything it touches. A photograph mounted on ordinary card is being slowly damaged by its own album. The terms to look for are acid-free and lignin-free, and for anything sold as photo-safe, a reference to the photographic activity test, which is the standard that actually means something.

Two materials do active harm. PVC sleeves release compounds that damage photographic emulsion, so polypropylene or polyester is the safe choice. And rubber cement and pressure-sensitive tape both fail within years, staining what they were holding.

There is a modern argument for the hobby too. Photographs now overwhelmingly exist only as files, and files are lost to failed drives and closed services. A printed book is a format that survives without maintenance.

How to take part

• Check that paper and sleeves are acid-free, lignin-free and not PVC.
• Never use rubber cement or ordinary tape on anything you want to keep.
• Write names and dates on the page. Unlabeled photographs become anonymous within a generation.
• Print some of the photographs currently living only on a phone.
• Look up Twain's patent, which is a genuinely clever piece of design.