Four more great vintage Scrapbook covers which a stall holder got from a house clearance recently (she had dozens and was asking £20 a pop as they were so good, but happily did me the four for £20 which seemed fair!). The illustrations are really vivid and must have jumped off the post office shelves back in the day.
The ’round the world’ scrapbook is quite elaborate, with painted illustrations in bright primary colours representing a number of European countries. Similarly eye-catching is the ‘souvenir’ scrapbook, which reminds me of a 1950s children’s annual cover. These were both owned by a fanatical Cliff Richard fan, who seems to have collected just about every single printed article. The oldest scrapbook covers the period March to October 1962, the other March to July 1963. Really they should be with a Cliff archive, I just wanted them for the covers!
The other two eschew Cliff in favour of more regular scrapbook fare. The blue one just has a vintage tractor on the front and is likely to have been a wartime purchase, as the content is all from 1946. It’s also quite a bit smaller and poorly printed compared to pre and post-War books, while the cover card is quite coarse suggesting a lot of recycled paper. The content is mostly clippings about animals put together by Rosemary Brownlow – think internet kittens of the day!
I don’t know who started the Television Scrapbook. There are only a few pages filled in, with what seem to be early 1950s cuttings of pets, flowers and scenic countryside. But the cover illustration is proper social history, showing an idealised family grouped around an early television set, though as far as I know there were none with screens that big in the UK at the time.
There are more scrapbook covers on the site if you’ve got the bug.
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