Scrapbooks An American History

Details About the Book :

· Subtitle : An American History
· Author : Jessica Helfand
· Hardcover : 190 pages
· Publisher : A Winterhouse Edition , Yale University Press, (New Haven & London),
( October 2008)
· Language : English
· ISBN : 978-0-300-12635-8
· Product Dimensions: 9.26x12.36x.83 in.
· Shipping Weight: 2.85 lbs.
· QNL / BNQ (Bibliothèque Nationale du Québec) Reference: 818.520309H4746s2008

Presentation of the editor :

About the author :

Jessica Helfand is partner, with William Drenttel in Winterhouse, a design studio in the Berkshires.

She is one of the four founding editors of Design Observer, currently the largest international blog of design and cultural criticism. A former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Communications Arts and Eye magazines, she has written for numerous national publications including Aperture, The Los Angeles Times Book Review and The New Republic, and has twice appeared on National Public Radio. A member of the Writers Guild of America for more than two decades, Helfand was previously part of the CBS-TV Guiding Light writing team that won an Emmy Award for best writing in 1985.

She is the author of several books on design and cultural criticism, including Paul Rand: American Modernist (1998), Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media and Visual Culture (2001) and Reinventing the Wheel (2002), which formed the basis for an exhibit in 2003 at The Grolier Club in New York City. Her next book, Scrapbooks: An American History will be published in 2008 by Yale University Press.

Helfand received both her BA and her MFA from Yale University, where she has taught for the last decade in the graduate program in Graphic Design, and where she is a Fellow at Jonathan Edwards College. She lives in Falls Village, Connecticut, with her husband, William Drenttel and their two children, Malcolm and Fiona.


About the book :

Combining pictures, words, and a wealth of personal ephemera, scrapbook makers preserve on the pages of their books a moment, a day, or a lifetime. Highly subjective, rich in emotional meaning, the scrapbook is a unique and often quirky form of expression in which a person gathers and arranges meaningful materials to create a personal narrative. This richly illustrated book is the first to focus close attention on the history of American scrapbooks - their origins, their makers, their diverse forms, the reasons for their popularity, and their place in American culture.

Jessica Helfand, a graphic designer and scrapbook collector, examines the evolution of scrapbooks from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present, concentrating particularly on the first half of the twentieth century. She includes color photographs from more than 200 scrapbooks, some made by private individuals and others by the famous, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lillian Hellman, Anne Sexton, Hilda Doolittle and Carl Van Vechten. Scrapbooks, while generally made by amateurs, represent a striking and authoritative form of visual autobiography, Helfand finds, and when viewed collectively they offer a unique perspective on the changing pulses of American cultural life.

Published with assistance from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

Link about the book :

http://www.winterhouse.com/scrapbookspress/


Pierre’s book review :

First of all, meet the author : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLz4_7lq9-U

Now that you know the author and the principles behind the book, take a look about
Marybelle Harn’s scrapbook :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU_Fgr3BNXg&eurl=http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300126358

Now look at Francis "Pop" Johnson’s scrapbook :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn8RogNyEKQ&feature=related

Now read a review in the New-York Times about this book :

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/books/review/Dixler-t.html


Pierre's opinion about the book :

This books gives you the quintessential images of some ancient crapbook’s pages carefully chosen over more than 200 books. This is a pure gem of modern graphical,cultural and historical anthropology when you look at scrapbooking done at a certain epoch as a micoscosm of this particulat time.

When you remove the theater, the music, the essay, the novels, the sculpture, the painting, the theater, the dance, the poetry from the performing arts, you enter inside a smaller intimate instinctive univers of remembrance, personnal cognitive expressions, souvenirs, wich uses a little bit of the light of the major arts and their modes of expression : this is scrapbooking. For people with less means of expression, instead of leaving a book to Humanity, they humbly leave a srapbook to their relatives. This is a way to say : I am flashing this little light of mine before dying anonymously.

Long ago, it must be -- I have a photograph. Preserve your memories: They're all that's left you. (Paul Simon)

You know my character : I have cried when I have seen the vid concerning Francis "Pop" Johnson’s scrapbook. As a man I saw there : all the companionship, all the friendship and the dedication for the nation those human beings, those soldiers had. This is very difficult to seize the vibrance of one soul when this soul is not a great composer or a great author but in fact all souls are vibrating equally. Jessica Hellfand is a sorceress wich leads us from one scrapbook page to another ; so we can meet people who copied and pasted some tiny parts of their universe.

My appreciation of the book : 9/10.

Pierre

My appreciation : 9 / 10 . A pure source of happiness.
Pierre