Diana Page Jordan | Book Reviews and Inspiration

October 24, 2008
I’m not into scrapbooking. Just not my thing. But I picked up SCRAPBOOKS: AN AMERICAN HISTORY by Jessica Helfand, and an amazing world opened. For one thing, as I read her fabulously-illustrated book, it suddenly struck me that in high school I was elected Class Historian. Okay, no one else wanted to keep up the massive scrapbook in the main hall, but I totally loved the process. My brother reminded me just a few days ago, that I would prop up an older scrapbook from a decade or two earlier, and open both pages to the same date for a comparative study in our times.
And SCRAPBOOKS opens strong — to the delightful scrapbook of a nineteen year old girl, eloping with her love. Then, little scraps of lilting poetry begin blowing across each page…until finally we realize that it is the beginning of poet Anne Sexton’s tortured life, the pristine beauty never exposed until now. Her suicidal poetry — from a darker, later time in her life — marked my own life. Her writing reminded me of my mother’s suicidal tendencies, and I read Sexton for relief. Yes, these words fit these feelings. “I came back to the scene of the disordered senses; came back last night at midnight…” These Sexton lines I still remember from my teen years, as my mother struggled at a mental hospital.
Another mind-bender. It was Mark Twain who received a patent for inventing a self-pasting scrapbook — made more money from those, apparently, than from all his other books combined.
So I am hooked, and I read SCRAPBOOKS in one sitting. It’s not just pictures. It’s sociology. It’s history. It’s passion.
The term scrapbooking itself was coined in 1929 — four months before the stock market crash.
Helfand shows a photo in her book of a clock stopped at 9:04 — it was acquired following the September 11th, 2001 attacks near the World Trade Center. She talks of today’s scrapbooking as a tool for recovery, a memory, even therapy.
The one night — years ago — that I decided to join a group of women at a series of card tables, with ribbons and scissors and stickers, I brought with me a few photos to begin a scrapbook. I have only one page. It is of my two sons, my husband and me in New York — which is my home town. They’d never been. The photos — us in Time Square at night, shots of us at the Yankees-Rangers game, and one of our family standing on the roof of the World Trade Center.