Post- Digital Print - Monoskop

A 19th-century
scrapbook
Although the author Mark Twain marketed his patented pre-glued
scrapbooks, most scrapbook practitioners would use old or otherwise
uninteresting books (such as free annual reports) as the physical basis
for their collections of clippings. 290 According to Garvey, scrapbooks
stem from the “desire to mark the path of one’s own reading”. The
limited space of the scrapbook allows only a finite (and thus necessarily
rigorous) selection from many available sources, resulting in a new
composition: a repository of personally relevant content.
We could also consider this phenomenon as an early (and analogue)
version of the current trend of ‘personal authoring’ made possible by
the Internet and its stockpile of free authoring tools for web pages,
blogs, social networks, etc. For most of the 20th century (with the
notable exception of its last few years, when the digital era began)
scrapbooks were used by fans to collect and preserve personal archives
of clippings and photos of their favourite movie stars and pop idols:
they were, in other words, repositories for the personal conservation
of ‘scraps’ of memory. All of this was done in a state of blissful ignorance
of the constraints of copyright – freely re-assembling clippings
from a variety of sources and recombining them into new collections.
(Incidentally, this phenomenon should not be confused with the somewhat
related concept of diaries, which usually deal with strictly personal
themes and sources rather than outside ones.)
To quote once again Ellen Gruber Garvey: “all media, old or new,
are experienced as renewable resources”. 291 And so, given a software
tool that would enable us to cut out ‘clippings’ from electronic media
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