Thanks to some good luck on eBay, I recently came in the possession of two scrapbooks, one from 1929 and one from 1932. While I’ve been collecting fan magazines for years, these are my first scrapbooks and they provide some fascinating insights in the ways audiences interacted with various magazines.
I found the contrast between both of them particularly fascinating. The first, which dates from 1932, is by far the more well-preserved and aesthetically beautiful; it only features pictures and particularly focuses on beautiful, full-colour cover images.
The 1929 one is less well-preserved, but it is much more personal. It contains a larger amount of different types of clippings, including star images, but also other pictures, jokes, cartoons, etc. Interestingly, this scrapbook also contains a number of annotations, such as on the image below, where the author asks herself “What will 2025 be like?”.
Do any other NoRMMA members own one or more scrapbooks of this nature? Let us know in a comment below!
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