Scrapbooks do something no other popular memory devices—neither diaries nor snapshots—can. They allow us to see and touch the actual objects that marked significant moments in people’s lives. In them, you may find a love letter from France, written by a lonely G.I. Or a menu, created by Escoffier himself, from a grand occasion at the Ritz. Or a brown and crumbling photograph of a Jarvis room at the turn of the twentieth century, complete with a mandolin, kerosene lamps, and a humidor filled with pipe tobacco.

Scrapbooks first appeared in the middle of the nineteenth century. New methods of printing, combined with rising commercial needs brought on by urbanization, unleashed a flood of flyers, posters, tickets, postcards, advertising cards, business cards, greeting cards, and calendars, in addition to increased numbers of magazines and newspapers, whose stories were often clipped and saved. Expanded postal services and widespread literacy meant that these materials were widely distributed. The impetus for keeping scrapbooks may have first come from people’s fascination with this novel new stream of information.

The Trinity College Archives has some 80 scrapbooks in its collection, the earliest one being that of William Gilbert Davies, Class of 1860, which contains material from the 1850s. They provide a vivid picture of college life in the century between the mid 1800s and the mid 1900s. Report cards, term papers, letters from parents, dance cards, athletic programs, and flyers for barbershops and haberdasheries catering to the “college man” tell us of a Trinity that was both different and in many ways much the same as it is today.

Miller

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