Autograph Book, Cover
A few days ago, while attending the Vintage Bazaar Holiday Pop-Up Shop, I came across an old autograph book. The moment I opened it and saw all the messages, I was entranced.
It’s a fairly delicate book, dating back to the late 1800’s. I’m gentle whenever I open it up, as I could easily rip out pages with a strong tug. The earliest date that I can find in the book is 1879, which at the time of this entry (2011) makes the book over 132 years old.
That’s a staggering number to consider. Even as I’m writing this, it’s hard for me to imagine the weight of 132 years (years!), tucked into such a small and fragile thing – a vessel of paper and ink, barely held together by its binding.
My plan is to try to scan and post a new image, each day. These scans will show up as regular blog posts… but I’ll also be collecting them under a different category: found objects. I’ve also created a dedicated project page, which will contain links to all the individual posts and every single high-res scan of the autograph book.
If you ever want to see every page in one spot, you can see them here.
I’m pretty excited by this project, and I’m really looking forward to sharing each page with you. I haven’t read through the whole thing yet, so I’ll be discovering things as I scan and post them. Almost everything in this book has been written in cursive – which makes reading a few of the pages a little tricky. I’m going to be taking my best guess in most cases, but I would really love to hear feedback from others. It’s going to be entirely possible that you’ll spot something that I might have missed.
The cover itself is a little blurry, due to the severe warping of exterior. The scans of the interior pages should be markedly sharper.
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