Last year I was splitting wood with my hydraulic wood splitter and listening to NPR on my FM hearing protector earmuffs. The Faith Middleton show came on which I’m not a great fan of but this particular show was on The Art & History of Keeping Scrapbooks which sounded interesting to me. Part way through the show (33.40 on the Audio controller) a woman named Jessica Helfand came on.

She was introduced as a professional graphic designer and a co-founder of the web site Design Observer, a site I’d been following for a while. She talked about having written a post on the site: Scrapbooking: The New Paste-Up that had hit a nerve with the established “hobby” scrapbooking community and professional artists and the way she talked about this hit a nerve with me. Collecting things is something I’ve done my whole life although I can honestly say that putting them in scrapbooks is not a step I’ve ever taken. But, the way Jessica talked about this entire movement reminded me of my years as a participant in the mail art movement and my own background as an artist.

Jessica has written a book: Scrapbooks: An American History and started a new web site to support discussion of this movement: The Daily Scrapbook.

I got in touch with her and found that she lives a few towns north of me in Connecticut and she graciously invited me to visit her studio, Winterhouse so we could talk more about all of this stuff. I haven’t done that yet although I did put her in touch with one of my old mail art connections and friends, Leavenworth Jackson so she could get some fine art rubber stamps.

Almost a year later I was pleased to see that the Gunn Library and Museum, right down the road from us in Washington, Connecticut was going to put up a show on scrapbooking curated by Jessica and that she’d do a talk: Booksigning and Chat with Jessica Helfand.

I went, finally meet Jessica which was great and found out about the youTube video of a talk Jessica did at The Cooper-Hewitt Museum which is embedded below. It’s long but I highly recommend watching it.

Scrapbooking is an analog thing while blogging, facebooking and tweeting are quite digital. Somehow I see them all as connected on some level and my interest is to find a way to merge at least my interest in all of these things. Stay tuned (but don’t hold your breath).