Charles Jekel's Scrapbook

This late nineteenth-century collection is not atypical for its time.  Assembled in a blank book whose cover trumpets the merits of progress, it’s a reminder that literacy practices are part of a larger cultural ethos.  Here, the combination of cover and collected material suggests that the activity of poetry scrapbooking was imagined to be a specifically modern literary activity—a sign of personal and cultural advancement going hand-in-hand with technological advancements in electricity, the telephone, and indoor plumbing.    <<Scrapbooks home