As someone who loves snail mail, I welcome each picture postcard as the best way to escape momentarily to some alluring, faraway place. But a group of 18 scrapbooks acquired with the John Margolies Collection of Travel Ephemera may change my mind. The earliest volume was created in 1906 on a honeymoon in the Adirondacks. The latest was produced in 1964 for a school assignment by a seventh-grader riding from Florida to New York with her grandparents. Perusing the pages of all these albums, I find that each one transports me to a distinct time as well as a particular place in the 20th century United States.
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Take, for example, the travel journal of three young women from Macon, Georgia who venture to Lookout Mountain, Tennessee in July 1944. What is it like for them to board a Greyhound bus full of GI’s in the middle of the night? Who shows them the right way to exchange coins for tokens to deposit into a fare box? And how does one react when she finds herself unexpectedly seated next to a member of another race? Their forty-four page typescript, accompanied by black-and-white snapshots and clippings from color guidebooks, captures the unbridled bloom of youth on a summertime lark in the wartime, segregated South.
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Travel scrapbooking is a tradition that has been handed down for generations. As a method of preserving one’s personal history, scrapbooking became popular in America during the 19th century with advances in paper-making and printing technologies. In 1900, the Kodak Brownie camera brought photography into the hands of the general public. Soon people were incorporating photographs as well as a strong narrative element into their albums along with the memorabilia. I documented my own maiden voyage on an extended trailer trip with relatives as “Canada or Bust” in 1970. Whether or not this summer season offers another golden opportunity to make a memorable journey, cataloging the Margolies travel scrapbooks strikes me as the next best thing.
Alice Hanes is the Technical Services Librarian at Hagley Museum and Library.