img. scrapbook.com. This antique bible was manufactured with the photo-holding pages bound into the book. The Baldwin family used the pages to store family photographs and it literally served as the family scrapbook from the 1870s through the 1920s.
An interesting resource to understand how scrapbooking came to be: from family bibles to calling cards, the history surprisingly dates back to the Middle Ages and went through centuries until this practice met its soulmate: everyday photography.
With the invention of portable cameras and faster and more effective photographic processes since the 1890s, photography moved from being something that was done professionally and mostly in studios – time-sensitive and expensive – to becoming a mass-market, more affordable to the average family, and thus moving out of studios and into families’ homes. Instead of having their photo taken a few times over the course of their lives, people began to have their photos taken regularly. By the early 1900s some people also began combining casual photos with scraps of important memorabilia, letters and decorative die-cuts and images into the same book in a decorative manner. Later on, the invention of color prints gave another push to the practice and diffusion of hand-made, multi-material decorated photo albums. Nowadays, digital photography and more in general the overall process of digitization and born-digital heritage is posing new challenges for scrapbooking.
This interesting article contains up to date research and is probably the most comprehensive resource on the internet on the topic:
