Welcome to The Scrap Album

Long before social media feeds and digital photo libraries, there was the commonplace book — a personal space for collecting “good sayings and notable observations.” In the sixteenth century it was a handwritten storehouse of wisdom, quotations and curiosities: a private archive of things worth remembering.

By the early nineteenth century this impulse had blossomed into scrapbooks and albums. These were wonderfully eclectic compilations — printed scraps, engravings, poems, sketches, pressed flowers, playbills and fragments of everyday life. As one contemporary writer described it, they contained “…a medley of scraps, half verse and half prose and somethings not very like either…” A charmingly honest description of what was, in essence, creative collecting.

With their richly embossed bindings and gilt-edged pages, albums were objects of beauty as well as amusement. For many young Victorian women, particularly those of comfortable means, an album was both a creative outlet and a social statement. Pages were arranged with care: sentimental poetry alongside original writings, delicate watercolours, pencil sketches and decorative flourishes. When complete, an album might sit proudly on the drawing-room table — a treasured possession displayed almost as reverently as the family Bible.

From the mid-1860s onwards, the explosion of colour printing transformed album-making. Valentines and Christmas cards, paper lace, embossed scraps and vivid chromolithographs provided irresistible material. These pieces of printed ephemera — once fleeting tokens of affection or celebration — were lovingly preserved in those “great swollen scrapbooks” that have survived into the twenty-first century.

Today, The Scrap Album continues that tradition of gathering and sharing. Here you’ll find a rich variety of Victorian printed ephemera — small works of art that were never meant to last, yet somehow have. They offer insight into taste, humour, commerce, sentiment and everyday life in the past.

So please explore, linger, and perhaps rediscover the quiet pleasure of collecting. The past isn’t distant here — it’s simply waiting to be turned like the next page.

Album

Albums & Scraps	Victorian Albums Victorian Scraps Father Tuck's Complete Picture Maker
Saint Valentines Day	Lace-Paper Valentines Comic Valentines
Easter & Fairyland	Easter Frolics In Fairyland
Christmas & New Year	A Victorian Christmas A Christmas Menagerie
Printed Ephemera	The Calendar Reward of Merit The English Lotteries
Publishers	Victorian Greeting Card Publishers