Another gallery of vintage scrapbook covers…
The Scrap Cracker Book looks to have just lifted a number of illustrations from children’s annuals of the late 1940s, and sold for a shilling in the late 1950s when this example was bought by Mr. and Mrs. Everard to give to Jane Bates as a present. Jane got swept up in the press coverage of the wedding of Princess Margaret in May 1960 and filled it with pictures cut from newspapers and magazines.
The Coronation Cuttings scrapbook is self explanatory, and The Daily Sketch must have anticipated a decent market for this, lending their own name to it and printing images on the inside covers. They even offered a whopping £200 prize for the best filled in copy! No wait, read the small print, a total of £200 in prizes split across 152 winners. Oh, and all the cuttings had to come from their newspaper! Entries by June 30th 1952. The owner of this copy didn’t bother and it is empty inside.
The cover artist of the stage Scrapbook is clearly the same person who did the flower stall one in the first gallery; similar style, same lettering and an almost CMYK colour pallet – deep red, blue, yellow and black. Inside the young owner has as above amassed a collection of royalty cuttings, mostly of the Queen and her coronation, all around 1952 to 1954.
The forth cover is by the same firm who issued the Scrapbook in gallery 2 with the pier illustration on; the design. lettering and illustration are clearly from the same unknown hand. This time it’s Nelson’s Column on the front. Inside, royalty cuttings yet again! The owner has arranged the cuttings nicely and even made a little folder inside the back cover for duplicates to swop with friends.
The sporting illustrations which decorate the fifth Scrapbook suggest a Sixties date to me, even though inside the owner has filled it with postcards from a 1950s holiday in Switzerland. The cover is credited too, to Rorbanelli. It was published by one of the big stationers of the time, Dickinson Robinson.
Postcards also once (the stall holder had taken out all the cards to sell separately) filled the Boots own brand Scrapbook, which again has a sixties design feel about it. Boots were a very useful shop for all sorts of own brand goodies back then. The managers of that time would have an absolute heart attack if they saw the run down tatty sub-Poundland state of their stores these days, easily the worst on the high street.
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