From the May 1, 1959 edition of the Vineyard Gazette:

Some people still keep scrapbooks, but it is fairly safe to say that the number of scrapbook-keepers has declined during the past fifty years. The great age of scrapbooks, so far as the Vineyard is concerned, was back in the nineteenth century when not only were there more scrapbooks, but the contents of these strongly personal repositories were more varied and curious.

Recent generation have been overwhelmed by an increasing and unending flow of published material: not only newspapers and magazines but circulars, calendars, catalogs, greeting cards, souvenir pamphlets and leaflets, and so on without end. A person would require a great deal of temerity to begin saving odds and ends from this great mass. The real problem, usually, is to throw stuff away fast enough.

It is to be supposed that most people do not even save string any more. There is a constant supply of string entangling our lives, and gummed tape, Scotch tape, cellulose ribbon, and a whole family of other fastenings as well. We do not live in a saving time of the world’s history.

Not only this, but the age is one of sophistication and of so many demands upon the attention that a state of general inattention results. The whole atmosphere is unfavorable for the gentle hobby of keeping a scrapbook.

This becomes clearer, perhaps, if one examines some of the scrapbooks of the past. There is such a specimen now before the writer of these lines — an elongated volume intended, probably as a bookkeeping journal but converted to the purposes of pasted-in clippings. This scrapbook was kept by a Vineyard woman; most were kept by women, and they used whatever book happened to be available, sometimes a logbook — to the chagrin of their descendants — or a book of wallpaper samples, or a cash book or ledger, previously used or unused.

The old scrapbook now to be examined began with poetry. This was certainly typical. The thought or the rhyme or the associations of some verse in newspaper or magazine appealed to a woman’s fancy; she liked it and did not want to let it go. There was time then to clip it out and paste it on a page where it could be read and re-read.

Close after poetry as a constituent of the ancient scrapbook came items of interest by reason of genealogy. On these pages, as on those of most volumes of the kind, appear numerous yellowed clippings suggestive of family relationships: an account of the Torrey family reunion in Foxboro, a biography of Sylvanus N. Staples, a New England business pioneer. One turning the pages so many years after the clippings were saved and carefully pasted, may imagine the combination of family interest and methodical disposition that led to the preservation of odds and ends about uncles and cousins, many of these relatives probably never seen by the keeper of the scrapbook.

Church was as close to the mind and heart as family, and in this old book are all the reports of the fiftieth anniversary observance of the Edgartown Methodist Church in 1893.

Poetry, family, church. And souvenirs, too; fragments to bring back golden memories. Such is a “programme” of Mr. G. C. Wheeler’s concert of March 2nd, 1876, given at Union Chapel in Oak Bluffs. There is special reason to attend with care an inspection of the names of the artists. Can a modern reader tell offhand what this reason is?

Part One of the concert proceeded as follows: Concert Overture, II Trovatore (Verdi), two pianos in unison, Misses Merry, Calhoun, Misses Sturtevant; solo, L’Arditi (Arditi), Miss Lilian B. Norton; piano solo, Sunset Shadows and Rememberence Grand March (T. P. Ryder), Miss Gracie Monroe.

Well has the reader observed any link with immortality? Probably not. Miss Lilian B. Norton, then so little featured, was to become the world famous Lilly of the North — Lilian Nordica, one of the greatest of all Wagnerian singers. That old time “programme” is worth keeping in anyone’s scrapbook.

But the scrapbook was also, in its original essence, a collection of odds and ends, and no mixture of clippings was desirable or unusual which did not contain chance fragments of information. So runs the characteristic miscellany of the old scrapbook, and the information contained therein is not without value for the historian of New England and its customs. For instance, one may learn here that Henry H. Jernegan recited Over the Hill to the Poor House at the grammar school examination in Edgartown in a certain year. Charles E. Fisher gave as a declamation Charge of the Light Brigade. Other declamations included: The Baron’s Last Banquet, The Legend of the Organ Builder, The Smitten Rock, and the Shadow on the Blind.

A certain aura of lavender and old lace is retained in such a volume, despite its outward severity, for these clippings were saved by someone who cared, and who lived in a time when haste was less and sentiment valued more than in the reign of the atom.

Compiled by Hilary Wall
library@mvgazette.com