January 31, 2006

By The Book

Virginia Postrel links to a WaPo article about the explosion in popularity of scrapbooking. The Missus happens to be a moderately fervent scrapbooker - we've got about half a dozen albums primarily documenting the Llama-ettes and various stockpiles of Creative Memories stuff. (While she regularly complains about being behind on her materials, no she does not go to scrap-meets.)

It strikes me that there is something vaguely supercilious about the tone of the piece, faintly condescending toward these legions of empty, deluded hausfraus who have nothing better to do with their time than construct false histories for their future consolation. I also think the piece perhaps over-analyzes the behavior patterns involved. Sometimes a family album is just a family album.

One thing that struck me as amusing was this bit:

"I jot down whatever is going on in our lives that month," said Jennifer Henson of Ashburn, a director with the company. "Then I'll do what a typical day is for us right now."

She'll take photos not just of her family but of the street, of the cars, of the gas station around the corner or else note the cost of a Big Mac. Including the ones she is working on, Henson estimated that she has about 100 scrapbooks.

Although some women suffer what they call "scrapper's block," others battle the opposite issue: They begin to see the world as a fine, double-page layout.

"It's so strange because you'll be out somewhere, and literally the title of the page will come into your head," said Sara Schermerhorn of McLean.

At a recent trip to the zoo, she kept seeing the title "Going Bananas!" hovering over her children. As many mothers have, she has taken her kids to a pumpkin patch, she said, because it would make a good layout.

Michelle McVaney, who runs Get Crafty, a scrapbooking retreat in West Virginia, said that some women wheel in suitcases of photos and crop for 24 hours straight, without sleep. It is easy, she said, to fall into an obsessive mindset, to believe that something is lost forever if it is not scrapbooked.

Now, after you're done tut-tutting, go back through that quote and substitute the word "blog" for the word "scrapbook" and ask yourself if you're really so very different.

Posted by Robert at January 31, 2006 01:50 PM | TrackBack
Comments

That's exactly what I was thinking as I was reading the quote.

Posted by: Rachel at January 31, 2006 02:21 PM

Ouch.

Seriously, though, I found myself defending the scrapbookers. Thirty years from now, who's going to have a better link to their memories: The bloggers and scrapbookers, or the people chiding them?

Posted by: Brian B at January 31, 2006 02:30 PM

Forget 30 years hence. What about in a century or two, when most of today's electrons are recycled as something else. One of the few tangibles of today's culture will be scrapbooks.

Posted by: rbj at January 31, 2006 02:57 PM

Sure----look for the two-oughts Scrapbooking exhibit at the Smithsonian in 2106.

Actually, I'm serious. I can almost see the swells writing in some highbrow literary mag in the 1850s about all those cornhole hausfraus in Pennsylvania with their tacky quilts.... A lot of anthropologists and historians are going to dig those things apart in a century.

Posted by: Steve the LLamabutcher at January 31, 2006 03:08 PM

All I can say is more power to 'em.

100 scrap books? I'd be in an institution.

Posted by: beth at January 31, 2006 03:10 PM

I'm in the Smithsonian frame of mind too. Some of the most valuable volumes in our rare book collection of the library are scrapbooks put together by women in the 1800's. PhDs of the future will be won on the scrapbooks being pasted together today - no kidding!

Posted by: Chai-rista at January 31, 2006 03:47 PM

When my last parent died, a battle royal ensued... I have no pictures of myself as a child or my family's ancestors.
On my husband's side, his brother sold all the stuff at a garage sale...
Needless to say, I have a hard time dealing with photographic memories of our ancestors. I prefer the ancient way; that is story telling of those I know that came before me.

Posted by: Babs at January 31, 2006 04:14 PM

Scrap-booking is definitely for type As: organized and time-consuming.

Blogging is for type Bs: jokey and time-consuming (unless you're really, really involved in the tech side of things - that's not us blogspotters).

Posted by: tee bee at January 31, 2006 04:37 PM

Chai-rista and Steve are dead right about the future value of scrapbooks and such. Right now I'm cataloging and evaluating an immense collection of small-town newspapers dating back to the 1850s that was found last year in an abandoned farmhouse. Over the course of a century, this stuff has moved from "slovenly fire hazard" to "scholarly treasure trove."

Posted by: utron at January 31, 2006 04:38 PM

Yep. I mean, have you ever seen the way archeologists get a hard on over discovering some pot shard that sheds some insight on habits of daily life? Those scrapbooks are going to be invaluable little slices of ordinary life that are nigh on impossible to recreate.

That, and indepth archeological digs of our landfills. Trust me.

Posted by: Steve the LLamabutcher at January 31, 2006 08:19 PM

Well, those freaks have scrapbooking cruises, so they are obviously better organized than us bloggers. I submit a blogger cruise be created. But I'm more of an idea guy. Let me know the details.

Posted by: Velociman at January 31, 2006 11:44 PM

Tee Bee is right. My wife is the type "A" in the house. I'm type ... "other than A."

I do, however, edit our home videos pretty obsessively to make them actually watchable. My wife has likened that hobby to her scrapbooking. And both of us agree that neither of us does it enough.

Posted by: JohnL at February 1, 2006 12:37 AM