Q&A / JESSICA HELFAND, author: Albums showcase fabric of their era

In “Scrapbooks: An American History,” author Jessica Helfand includes multiple full pages excerpted from five scrapbooks —- four from different parts of the U.S. and one a travel journal from India. The first feature was created between 1913 and 1916 by Charlotte Christine Dobbs of Marietta.

We queried Helfand about the star treatment of the locally made scrapbook, and more, in an e-mail interview.

Q: What’s the backstory of this Marietta young woman’s scrapbook that you found so appealing?

A: Christine Dobbs met her husband, George Guernsey, as a child. Their wedding, in Marietta, was one of the great social events of that season [summer 1916]. The bride’s father was a state senator, and the numerous parties and social gatherings connected to her wedding were reported in great detail in the local and regional papers at the time.

Dobbs included pressed flowers from her bridal bouquet with a caption that suggested it had been her lifelong plan to carry pink flowers. On a subsequent page, she documented her wedding gown, veil and trousseau by clipping parts of the hem of each. As the book has remained closed for many years, these fabric swatches have retained a remarkable degree of their original color saturation.

Finally, a handwritten ledger at the end of the book is a log of more than seven pages of bridal gifts (many of them duplicative), offering an astonishing lens on the social custom and material culture of the period. Though her written contributions are primarily documentary in nature, she made a book filled with rich and captivating detail.

Q: Did you find in your research that there’s a Southern scrapbook aesthetic?

A: There are occasional words or cultural references that brand a scrapbook (and more to the point, a scrapbook maker) as Southern in origin: Blanche Kalfus kept a scrapbook in Louisville, Ky., in the early 1920s that includes party favors and detailed menu items, and writes on one page, “The eats were mighty fine.”

Other than [such cadences or local references], I would say probably not. The more noticeable differences are between books composed in cities vs. those made in more rural areas, where the kinds of things people saved might reflect different social preoccupations, different cultural reference points.

But even here, as time wore on, these sorts of differences began to blur: Schoolgirls, for instance, were fond of saving school items —- report cards, sports and theater tickets and so on —- next to advertisements from their local newspapers showing movie star pinups or fashion spreads. In this way, they honored their own personal needs while at the same time letting a little bit of the outside world in.

Q: How did you find the Southern scrapbooks in your collection or that you included in your book?

A: I found all of the scrapbooks the same way, by looking. And often this was like looking for a needle in a haystack —- I probably looked at close to a thousand scrapbooks before selecting those in my book.

Q: Where, typically, have you found the scrapbooks that make up your 200-plus collection —- antiques shops or … ?

A: Antiques shops, ephemera fairs, eBay, and through other collectors and dealers.

Q: What’s the typical price range you’ve paid?

A: $10 to $100 —- most on the lower end of that scale.