ScrapHappy September 2025 — A Scrapbook from 1938

In a recent purchase of a box of books, I found a double treasure.

First of all, the book itself is from 1887:

The preface makes the bold statement: “Our album of authors gathers into one volume a knowledge of the men and women who have made the standard literature of the world.”  A few Italian and French authors are included, but most of them are English or American, and of the 92 authors included, only six are women.

Each author is given a few pages, and for about half of them, a portrait is included, a plate that is an etching on one side and blank on the other:

So all that would be interesting in itself, but even better, in the 1930s, someone decided that those blank pages were the perfect place to store newspaper clippings and typed poems– the sort of thing that in the early 2000s, my parents would have sent me in emails.

The saved articles are mostly about Dickens and Edison, but there are clippings about a stewardess with a broken leg, a very young child who could speak 3 languages, and a few “New York Day by Day” columns, one of which contained this gem:

“The Duke of Windsor’s favorite new American slang word is ‘sockdolager‘.”  I certainly never heard that word before, but I looked it up and it is an actual word, and I think it may be time to bring it back.  🙂

Here are a few more of my favorite pages:

ScrapHappy Day is the 15th of each month.  It is a day when we celebrate the scrappy things in our lives, even if we didn’t create them ourselves!  I hope you have enjoyed this glimpse of an old scrap collection, and to see what people are crafting with scraps in our time, you can check out all these blogs!

Kate, Eva, Sue, Lynda,
Birthe, Turid, Tracy,
Jan, Moira, Sandra, Chris, Alys,
Claire, Jean, Dawn, Gwen,
Sunny, Kjerstin, Sue L, Vera,
Ann, Dawn 2, Carol, Preeti,
Nóilin, Viv, Karrin, Amo, Alissa, 
Tierney and Hannah