One could argue the first scrapbook was a drawing on a cave wall thousands of years ago. However with the advent of affordable paper, precursors to modern scrapbooks became available to a wider array of people. In the beginning the scrapbooks were a way to compile poems, letters, quotations and recipes too. Each scrapbook was unique to its creator’s particular interests and they share it with their friends, so, they became popular in the 16th century.
The albums were often used used by people who travel all over the world and want to create a souvenir from their trips, including fotos, expositions they saw in a museum, or the importance for them of the work of art commissioned by local artisans. Starting in 1570, it became fashionable to incorporate colored plates depicting popular scenes such as Venetian costumes or Carnival scenes. These provided affordable options as compared to original works and, as such, these plates were not sold to commemorate or document a specific event, but specifically as embellishments for albums.
In 1775, James Granger published a history of England with several blank pages at the end of the book. The pages were designed to allow the book’s owner to personalize the book with his own memorabilia. The practice of leaving pages to personalize at the end of books became known as grangerizing. Additionally, friendship albums and school yearbooks afforded girls in the 18th and 19th centuries an outlet through which to share their literary skills, and allowed girls an opportunity to document their own personalized historical record previously not readily available to them.
Old scrapbooks tended to have photos mounted with photomounting corners and perhaps notations of who was in a photo or where and when it was taken. They often included bits of memorabilia like newspaper clippings, letters, etc.
Joseph Niépce promote this new original art beginning the first permanent photograph in 1826. In fact, the invention of George Eastman’s paper photographs in the 1880 and, a camera designed to be simple – the Kodak Brownie – enable the photograph art to be available for an ever-widening population. This allowed the average person to begin to incorporate photographs into their scrapbooks.